Singing to Somebody Asleep

She sings four. Always the same four, and always in the same order, and she worked out the order in the first month and has never changed it.

Her grandmother has been what the notes call minimally responsive for four years. She is not asleep in the ordinary sense. She is somewhere, and nobody can say where, and the doctors are honest about not knowing, which she has come to appreciate.

So on Tuesday and Friday afternoons she pulls the chair around to the side of the bed, and she takes the old woman's hand, and she sings.

She is not a singer. She wants that clear. She has a thin voice that goes flat on anything above a certain note, and she knows it, and there is a phrase in the third hymn that she has never once got right in four years, and she still does it, because leaving it out would be worse.

The four are the ones the old woman sang. Not the ones in the book at the home. The ones she sang over a sink for fifty years, which is a different repertoire entirely, and which the granddaughter only knows because she spent nine summers in that kitchen.

Nobody else is ever there. That is the actual situation. Staff come past. The door is usually ajar. But there has never once been a person in that room who heard the four hymns, because the one person they are for cannot receive them and nobody else has ever come.

Four years. Two afternoons a week. She has not done the arithmetic and would rather not.

There were two weeks in the second year when she stopped. Not dramatically. She went, and sat, and held the hand, and could not get the first line out, and after twenty minutes she went home. She did that three times, and then on the fourth visit she started again, and she has never told anybody about those two weeks, and it is the thing she is most ashamed of and least sure she should be.

The question is not whether it is worth doing. She would say yes without hesitating. The question is much narrower and it arrives about once a month in the parking area before she goes in. It goes: is there anyone at all on the receiving end of this. Not is it a good thing to do. Is anybody receiving it.

You will have your own version. The thing you keep offering into a silence with no evidence that it lands.

Called by name, which is what a name is for

There is a sentence in Isaiah that is spoken to a whole nation and is written in the singular, deliberately, so that it lands on one person at a time.

But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine."Isaiah 43:1

I have called you by name. Stop on the verb tense, because it is doing something. Not I will call you. Not I know your name. I have called you, past tense, completed, an event that already happened.

Which means the naming is not waiting on the person's ability to respond. A name is spoken by the one who does the naming. It does not require the named party to be conscious, or capable, or present in any way the room could detect. That is the whole grammar of the thing.

So take it plainly: you are singing into a room where a name was already spoken over the woman in the bed, and that is what Isaiah 43 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence given to a people in exile and lays it down across a hospital blanket on a Tuesday.

And this is where the parking area question turns over. She asked whether anyone is on the receiving end. The honest answer about her grandmother is that nobody knows, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because pretending would be its own kind of cruelty. But the room is not empty. There has never been an afternoon in four years when there were fewer than two conscious parties in it, and one of them was the one who did the calling.

The hymns are not being broadcast into a void and hoping. They are being sung in the presence of somebody who has already named both women in that room.

You have been heard every single time, including in the phrase you have never once got right, because Isaiah 43 says the calling by name is finished rather than pending, and His Spirit is the one who makes an ancient sentence sit down in a chair beside a bed.

The two weeks she stopped

Now I want to go straight at the two weeks, because leaving it would leave the most important thing unsaid.

Three visits where she could not sing. She has carried that for two years as a failure, and it is not one, and the reason it is not is doctrinal rather than kind.

None of the four years is buying anything. There is no account. If the singing were buying something, then three silent visits would be a shortfall, and the shame would be arithmetic rather than feeling. But a crown in Scripture is never a wage. It is placed on a head by somebody else, always, and in the one glimpse we get of people holding one, they take it off and throw it down.

Which means the two weeks cost her nothing with God, and the four years bought her nothing with God, and both halves of that sentence are load-bearing. You are held by a regard that did not move during the two weeks, and you were held by it on the afternoon you drove home without singing, because the written word puts our standing on Christ and never on our record, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a reassurance.

And nobody is ranked. She is not further along than the cousin who has visited twice. That comparison does not exist in this book, and a hidden faithfulness that starts scoring itself against a visible absence has swapped something true for something exhausting.

I will also not tell you that your grandmother hears it, because Scripture does not say that and I am not going to furnish a silence. What the word says is that a name has been called and that the calling is done, and that is a great deal more solid than a comfortable guess. You have been standing on something written rather than on something hoped, and His Spirit is what makes the difference between those two feel like ground.