I Have Not Sung One In Eleven Years

A man in a queue was humming and he did not recognize it for about four seconds and then he did, and he had to put his basket down.

It was one of the ones from home. Not a famous one. Not one anybody would have heard on anything. Just one of the ones that got sung, at the back of a room, by people he was related to, when he was small.

And the man in front of him in a supermarket queue was humming it, badly, to himself, and had almost certainly got it from somewhere else entirely.

He is thirty nine. He came into the room he is in at twenty eight and he learned everything. Gladly. Nobody made him. He learned the songs first because he wanted to be able to sing with everybody rather than stand there, and he was good at it, and within about a year he knew the whole book.

And standing in that queue he worked out that he has not sung a single one of the ones he came in with, out loud, since.

Eleven years.

Not privately. Not in the car. Not at home. Not once.

He did not decide that. There was no evening where a man sits down and gives up a repertoire. He learned a great many new songs and he had a finite number of occasions on which anybody sings anything, and the new ones filled them.

He said out loud in the car park: I know all of theirs and none of mine come out any more.

You know that queue.

Maybe yours is songs and maybe it is something else that lives in the same place. A way of praying, a phrase, a thing people said at the end of a meal. Maybe you would still know every word if somebody started it, and you would, and that is not the point.

Nobody asked you to stop. That is the thing about this one. There was no exchange, no condition, nobody who suggested that learning theirs meant putting yours down. It was just what happened when a finite number of Sundays got filled.

Read the list

Here is an instruction about singing, and the interesting part is that it is a list.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.Colossians 3:16

Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.

Three categories, named separately, and nobody has ever fully agreed on where the boundaries between them are, which is itself part of the point. He is not naming a repertoire. He is naming a range, and the range is plural, and it is plural in the instruction itself.

And notice what the singing is for: teaching and admonishing one another. Which means the songs are not only worship, they are how a group carries what it knows to itself, and a room that ends up with one kind of song has narrowed how it can carry anything.

You are carrying songs the instruction itself makes room for, and the plural was there from the beginning. That is what the three named categories in Colossians 3:16 establish (Colossians 3:16), and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as bringing all things to remembrance, which is a work that has kept eleven years of unsung words entirely intact in a man in a queue.

Nothing was traded

Now the useful part, because you have been half suspecting that you sold something.

You did not. There was no transaction and nobody asked for one. Learning that room's songs was a good and generous thing to do and it is why you can sing with everybody rather than stand there, and you would do it again.

What happened is arithmetic. There are, in an ordinary life, a limited number of moments in which anybody sings anything out loud, and every one of yours got filled with the new ones, and a thing that never gets a slot eventually stops arriving.

You have not given anything away, and nothing was asked of you in exchange for what you learned. Scripture says every good gift and every perfect gift is from above (James 1:17), and both sets of songs are in that sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in the singing of both, in a room in the present and at the back of a room a long time ago.

And nothing here says bring them in

Let me be plain, because there is an obvious suggestion available and it is not the one being made.

Nothing here tells you to introduce your songs to that room, to ask anybody to learn them, to raise it with whoever chooses what gets sung, or to feel that a room which sings one kind of thing is doing something wrong. It is not.

And nothing here tells you what any gathering ought to sing, in any direction, because that is not this site's business and it never will be.

You are not being handed a campaign about anybody's music. The word says let all things be done unto edifying (1 Corinthians 14:26), and it is the Holy Spirit who leads a body in what edifies it, over time, and He does not need a man with a grievance to start it.

The whole of what is being suggested happens with nobody else present.