The Hymn I Know By Heart

She has sung it since she was a girl and she does not need the book.

That is the thing about a hymn you have had since you were seven. It is not memorized, exactly. It is in the same place as the way home and your own telephone number, and it comes out whether you send for it or not.

Verse one. Verse three, because they always skip verse two in that place. The last verse slower, the way everybody does.

And a while back, standing in the second row, she noticed she had got to the end of it without being present for any of it.

Not distracted. She was not thinking about the dinner. She was not thinking about anything at all, which is somehow worse, and the whole thing had come out of her in the right order at the right speed with her mind somewhere she could not name.

She is seventy-four. She has meant that hymn in her time. She meant it at her mother's funeral and she meant it in the bad winter and she meant it once, standing in a field, for reasons she has never told anybody.

And lately it comes out on its own.

Now let me be careful, because there is a cruel version of this and I will not preach it. She has not become a hypocrite. Nothing has gone rotten. A woman of seventy-four who is still in the second row every Sunday is not somebody anybody gets to call cold.

But she knows, and it sits with her afterwards, in the car park.

So let me ask you.

Which words come out of your mouth on their own?

He asked for the joy back in the plainest words there are

There is a psalm written by a man in the worst trouble of his life, and it is the plainest thing in the book.

He is not being clever in it. There is no poetry to speak of. It is a man asking for things in the order he needs them, and in the middle of it he asks for one thing that always stops me.

Restore to me the joy of Your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.Psalm 51:12

Restore.

You cannot restore something to somebody who never had it. That word only works if the thing was there before, and has gone, and both facts are known to the person asking.

He is not asking to be given something new. He is asking for the return of a thing he can remember having, which means he knew the difference and said so out loud to God rather than to anybody else.

And look at the second half, because it is the one people skip.

A willing spirit. Not a feeling. Not an experience. Willingness, which is the thing that goes first when something has cooled, long before anybody stops attending, and which nobody can manufacture in themselves by trying harder.

He asks for both, in one verse, from a man who at that moment had every reason to think he was owed nothing at all.

Hear where you stand, seventy-four years old in the second row.

You are not a cold woman. Scripture gives you the exact word for what you have noticed, and the word is restore, and the Holy Spirit poured out on all people has never once required a person to work up a feeling before He would come near them.

And I want to say the plain thing about hymns, the way I would say it on a porch.

The fact that it comes out on its own is not the failure. It is the reason you still have it.

Something that goes that deep into a person is not a shallow thing that has worn out; it is a thing that went in so far it now runs without help, and that is what let it be there for you at your mother's funeral when you had nothing.

You did not lose it by singing it too often. It went underground, which is what deep things do, and a thing underground has not gone.

The word says restore to me the joy, and that verse was written by somebody standing where you were standing in a car park.

And you are not a cold woman. Psalm 51 hands you the exact word for it, and the word is restore, which only works about a thing that was genuinely there, and the Holy Spirit has not required anybody to work up a feeling before He would come near.