Zephaniah Every Day

Zephaniah Every Day

He will rejoice over you with joyful songs. Zephaniah 3:17

Caught in the light of a splendid window,

laying in a paint pallet on the church floor

seeking in my bible the words You would have me hear,

I can almost imagine You singing.

I can almost see that day,

when all are believers,

when finally you can call us all home.

As we come running to you,

arms open as children to their father,

I can almost hear You singing.

My father used to sing to me in the morning,

so early before he drove me to school for band rehearsal,

hours before he needed to be awake.

Used to sing:

Oh what a beautiful morning……

or You Are My Sunshine.

He sang that to his discontented teenage daughter who was stealing the money he left on the buffet by  accident.

Every day.

I can almost hear You singing too.

Right through the angry, the rebellion,

the hurt and the hate,

the lies, and the ungrateful

mixed up lives that all we human ‘teenagers’ live.

All the time singing and shepherding us along to wherever we think we need to be.

Watching over us all the time.

You're always in the driver's seat, because we never grow up.

And to be honest, like my dad, I think you're playing the oldies station.

And it bugs me now like it did then.

But every time I turn that station on, I think of him.

And, like Happy Together and Jail House Rock put me back in his car,

Morning Has broken, I hear you Calling, and I Am The Bread Of Life

puts me firmly back in Yours.

But sometimes, just on the edge of my belief,

I think I can hear You singing to me.

And I suspect now,

That you do it

every day.

I suspect he sang to me even after I walked away from him, even after I took what was his.

Every day.

I'd say I don't deserve your Songs, i'd say I havn't earned them, I'd say You're wasting them on me. That You have no reason to rejoice in me.

And all of that is true, except for the part where I became free from my sin, became extraordinary, became white as snow.

And now, in this puddle of light reading these words, that I had no idea even existed, so blown away by the idea of God singing praises to me, all I can do is try to understand. Made more overwhelming by the fact that somewhere in my mind, there's a voice growing ever louder by the moment, telling me:

Every Day.