The Song They Will Sing Without Him

He started the singing in that courtyard thirty one years ago and it was an accident.

Somebody had a guitar at a family meal and he knew the words and the rest of it happened over three decades without anybody planning a thing. Now it is a fixed feature of that street on a warm evening and there are people in their twenties who assume it has always existed.

He is sixty four.

Here is what has begun happening in him and he has told nobody.

He has started working harder.

Not at anything visible. He has started teaching the songs more deliberately. He has started saying who wrote what and when it came into the family. He has begun, very quietly, to organize things in a way he never did, which is entirely out of character for a man who has spent thirty one years letting a courtyard do whatever it does.

And under it there is a sentence he has never once said out loud.

When I go, this stops, unless I leave enough behind.

He is not frightened of dying. He is frightened of a courtyard that goes quiet, and the two are not the same, and he has been carrying the second one on his own for about two years.

If you have started working harder in order to outlast yourself, sit down and eat something. There is no warning here and nothing is at risk in the way you have been imagining.

The commending is done by generations, and God is the subject

There is a line in a psalm about exactly this and it is one of the quiet ones.

One generation shall commend your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts.Psalm 145:4

Read who is doing what. The generations do the commending. But look at what they commend, because it is not each other. Your works. Your mighty acts. The thing being handed forward is God's, and the people are the ones who happen to be carrying it at the time.

That changes the size of what you are holding.

You have been trying to arrange the survival of something you think of as yours. And the psalm describes a chain of people, none of whom was ever responsible for the existence of the next link, all of them talking about the same works, which are not theirs.

You are one generation in a handing forward that started before you and does not stop with you. Psalm 145:4 puts the works in God's hands and the generations in a line, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the guarantee of what is coming in Ephesians 1:14, which means the courtyard is not being held open by you alone.

Finishing is not the same as securing

Now let me say the thing plainly, because you are a warm man and this has come at you from love rather than pride.

There is nothing wrong with teaching the songs. Nothing here is against handing things on, and if you want to tell people who wrote what and when it came into the family, that is a gift and not anxiety.

What has happened is subtler and you know it, which is why the sentence has never been said.

You have added the survival of the whole thing to your own list of responsibilities, and that is the one item on the list that was never yours, because a thing that only continues if one man arranges it was never a tradition. It was a performance with a very long run.

You are not the one securing this, and you never signed for it. Philippians 1:6 says the One who began a good work brings it to completion, and it is His Spirit who is the seal on that, so the arranging you have been doing for two years was never actually assigned.

Jude ends his letter the same way: to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy. Able to keep. Able to present. Not one verb belongs to the man being kept, and the destination is joy rather than a legacy.

And I am not going to tell you whether that courtyard will still be singing in forty years. Nobody can and nobody should, and anybody handing you a promise about your own legacy is selling you something.

But there is no alarm here either. You are held by somebody who does not get tired, and you are held this evening. Isaiah 40:28 says He does not faint or grow weary and His understanding is unsearchable, and it is His Spirit within you who keeps a person going long past the point where their own arranging ran out.

God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you, and that is why a man can sit down at his own party.