The Song He Stopped Playing

The case has been against the kitchen wall for two years, and there is a dish towel folded on top of it now, which is how you can tell nobody is planning to open it.

Nando's kitchen. Yellow light, a pan soaking, the radio on low because the radio is always on low. He walks past that case eleven times an evening. He has stopped seeing it the way you stop seeing a coat rack.

Here is what used to happen. Somebody in the neighborhood died, and by nine the next morning somebody's daughter would be on the stairs saying, Nando, would you. And he would. Rosaries, wakes, the long hot afternoons in the side room of the funeral home where nobody knows what to do with their hands. He knew the old songs, the ones the abuelas needed, and he knew when to stop playing, which is the harder skill. Fourteen years of it. He never once treated it as work.

Then there was a night. It does not matter whose. He played what the widow asked for, and afterward a cousin came out onto the steps and told him, quietly and with an enormous amount of control, that he had made the evening about himself, that everyone had been talking, and that the family would have preferred silence. Then he went back inside and shut the screen door.

Nando stood on those steps for a while. Then he carried the case home through streets he had walked a thousand times, and he set it against that wall, and he has walked past it eleven times an evening ever since.

He is not bitter. Ask him and he will say, honestly, that he is fine, that he was probably too much, that it was two years ago, that people are busy. He goes to Mass. He waves at everybody. He is warm at the door and warm at the store and when somebody's daughter comes up the stairs now, which happens less, he says his back is not what it was.

What is actually true is that a lid came down on a Tuesday night, and it has stayed down, and Nando has quietly filed that under being sensible.

There is a lid like that in your house. Not a guitar case. Something else, something only you could name, a thing you used to do for people that you have not done since a particular evening. And you have told yourself a reasonable story about it, because it is a reasonable story, and you were not wrong to protect what got hit.

What Closed Was A Lid, Not A Man

Start with the object, because the object is smaller than the story about it.

A lid closed. A specific lid, on a specific evening, for a reason anybody in the neighborhood would understand. Nando did not become a hard man on those steps. He put something down after it got hit, which is what hands do, and there is nothing in this piece that is going to tell him off for it.

You have been carrying a closed case, not a closed heart, and those two things are not the same object. It is written down in Psalm 51:10 as a request and never as an accusation, create in me a clean heart, renew a right spirit within me, and the renewing in that verse is the Spirit's own work and not the psalmist's effort.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.Psalm 51:10

Look at who does what in that sentence. David is not tightening his own screws. He is not resolving to be a better man by Thursday. He asks God for a verb he cannot perform on himself, and the whole psalm is a man in the worst week of his life handing over the one thing he cannot fix.

That is the position. Not effort. Not a new attitude. A request from a kitchen.

You were right to protect yourself, and nothing in Scripture calls a bruise a sin. Psalm 103:14 says He remembers what we are made of and that we are dust, and the Holy Spirit has never once treated a wound as a character flaw.

So let us be exact about what dried up. It was not his kindness. He is kind at the door and kind at the store. It was not his love of the old songs, because he still hums them over the pan. What dried up was the small, unguarded motion of putting the case in the car without checking first whether it would be wanted.

That motion. Not the man. The motion.

The Hands Move Before The Heart Catches Up

Here is the thing everybody gets backward, and it costs years.

We wait to feel like it. We assume that somewhere ahead of us there is a morning when the old warmth comes back on its own, and on that morning the case gets opened. So the waiting becomes the plan. Two years of waiting, and the warmth is supposed to arrive first and do the heavy work.

It does not run in that order. It has never run in that order.

You have permission to act before you feel anything at all. The Spirit moves ahead of a mood far more often than behind one, and it is written that the Samaritan saw, and stopped, and did the next physical thing, with not one line about his feelings anywhere in the account.

Mercy is a motion. It is not a temperature you have to reach first. The man on that road was not described as warm. He was described as near, and moving.

You are being softened by God in a way you did not have to arrange. That is Scripture, not encouragement, and the Holy Spirit is what carries it.

And I want to say plainly what this is not asking of you, because that matters as much as anything else here.

It is not asking you to go back. Not to that room, not to those steps, not to that screen door. Nothing on this page sends you toward anybody, and if the people in your story are people it would not be good for you to be near, then this is not about them at all and never was. The case does not have to be opened in front of the people who closed it. It can be opened in your own kitchen, with the radio on low, for nobody.

You are still the person who used to be the first one there, and that person was never a fool. You do not have to take my word for it. His word says a bruised reed He does not break, in Isaiah 42:3, and the same Spirit who put that line down is at work in you tonight.