Always a song

I am not a fan of country music. When we spent the weekend in Nashville, we heard a lot of it around the indoor pool. It is fascinating the things that the country songwriters write about. Broken hearts, broken cars, trailer parks, dogs. Put to music, the woes of various down and outers become danceable and upbeat.  Maybe this incongruity is what makes one a fan of the genre. The Psalms in the Bible are like that. They range from lofty and lovely hymns of praise to gritty, desperate cries for help. The writers tell tales of sublime peace, the Lord is my Shepherd, as well as indescribable suffering, just one Psalm before: They pierced My hands and feet. The small print under many Psalms give instruction to the Chief Musician, set to the tune of a certain well known melody of the day. We still get to do that. We can put to words the stories of our own day, the good and the not so good, the gritty and the sweet. We can put the words to music, and sing to God as David did, rejoicing or crying. We can lift up our voice and shout a word of praise or panic. In a song, they come to the same place; where the melody takes away the hurt and smooths out the rough edges. We might just find our feet tapping and our hands clapping in spite of ourselves.