The Tune Nobody Taught Him

Ferrell Hoke had his uncle's fiddle, and everybody in three counties knew which fiddle it was.

Dessie Hoke had played it at every wedding, every homecoming and every fifth Sunday singing from 1961 until the winter he died, and he had about forty tunes that people asked for by name. When the instrument came to Ferrell, it came with the forty. He learned them the way you learn scripture from a person you love, which is exactly, with the pauses in the right places.

He was good. Nobody said otherwise. When he played Dessie's tunes people leaned back and closed their eyes and got that look, and Ferrell watched them get it and knew perfectly well the look was not for him.

There was another tune. It had been coming to him since he was maybe nineteen, a plain crooked little thing in a minor key that started on the wrong beat and only had two parts. It was not anybody's. Nobody taught it to him and he had never once written it down, because writing it down would have made it a claim, and Ferrell Hoke was not going to stand up in front of people who had heard Dessie Hoke play and claim anything.

So for twenty-six years he played it under his breath while he tuned. Only while he tuned. A few seconds of it, half-voiced, and then he would say all right, what do you all want to hear, and somebody would say Bonaparte's, and he would play Bonaparte's the way Dessie played it.

Then came a Friday in January at Ruby Hoke's house, rug rolled back, every lamp in the place on, twenty people and four children and a dog, the way that family had done it since before the war. Ferrell was tuning in the corner with a plate of cake balanced on his knee. Doing the little crooked tune under his breath the way he had a thousand times.

And Ruby, who was eighty-four and had been married to Dessie for fifty-one years, said, from the good chair by the stove, without looking up from her cake:

"Play that one."

Ferrell said, that is not a tune, Aunt Ruby.

And Ruby said, "Honey, I have been listening to you tune since you were nineteen years old, and I have been waiting on that one for twenty-six years. Play it."

So he played it. It took maybe fifty seconds. It started on the wrong beat and it had two parts and it was crooked, and that whole front room went quiet, forks and all, even the children, the way a room goes when something true happens in it and nobody planned it.

When it was done Ruby wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and said, "Dessie would have gone crazy over that one."

Then she said the other thing, the one Ferrell carried home in his chest and could not put down.

"He never could play anything but his own."

The man with no words for it

There is a verse in the middle of Psalm 34 with a whole life in it, and it takes six words to say what happened.

This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.Psalm 34:6

Notice what Scripture does not preserve. There is no transcript. There is no wording. We are not told what he said, how long he took, whether he got the order right, or whether he used any of the good phrases. The verb is cried. That is the whole of his contribution to the historical record, and God moved.

You have direct access, and it is not a lesser grade of access because your words come out plain. That is not my kindness talking over your situation. The written word gives that man one verb and gives God the whole rest of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries an unpolished cry the same distance He carries a beautiful one.

And there is a thing about the psalm this verse sits in that you may not have been told. David wrote it after one of the least dignified episodes of his life, when he was hiding from a king and scratching on a gate and letting spit run down his beard to look out of his mind. That is the man who wrote this poor man cried. He knew the territory. He was not writing from the platform.

The plainness you are embarrassed about is the exact register God has been answering since the beginning. Scripture says He is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and the Spirit does not wait at a distance until a person composes themselves.

Now let me name the actual weight, because it is not laziness and I will not have you thinking it is.

You keep rereading her handwriting because her words worked. You watched them work. You watched that woman pray for people and things happened, and the notebook in her hand is the closest thing you have to proof that God answers somebody in your family. Yours are untested. Hers are field-tested. Given the choice between a proven prayer and an untried one, anybody would read.

Hear this: you have never once been out of order for loving what she wrote. God gave her to you, and Scripture never treats an inheritance of faith as a fault. He is not asking you to think less of her handwriting.

He is asking to hear yours.

Because here is what a journal cannot do, and she knew it better than anyone. A written prayer is a record of a conversation that already happened between God and a woman who is not in this room. You can read it a thousand times and it is still their conversation. Your own access is not pending, and it is not borrowed from hers. It is yours because Christ opened it Himself. The word says we have boldness to enter by the blood of Jesus, and the Spirit inside you is the same Spirit who was inside her, not a lesser posting.

And I will tell you what I believe about your aunt, from knowing the kind of woman who keeps a journal like that. She was not writing you a script. She was showing you it can be done. The thing she wanted most is the thing you have been putting off, and it is already within your reach today.