There’s a song with words I don’t know. Feel the music in my bones, though.
The spine straight despite hate. The chin up, the gait of feet with a rhythm that can’t wait.
Echoes of this unsung song everywhere — I didn’t even mean to rhyme. Yet the beat is there (see?).
Sometimes my tongue feels heavy and swollen and dry because its muscle-memory has dementia. It is parched for a language lost somewhere.
The Atlantic.
The whip.
Somewhere gone, this language woven in my DNA but frayed at the edges of times past.
I know the end, for it is written: ten thousand tongues sing, nations and tribes intact and distinct—each face, a glory—singing to The Lamb.
There’s a reason why a whiff of mountain mint brings tears to my eyes; why blues and greens and the Indian ocean bring me otherworldly peace; why the shape and shade and smiling eyes of some just feels like home.
I long for the unwritten part; resolution. The question marks on my soul finally smoothed into sighs of understanding. When God introduces me to the plan of us and shows me all the torn strands because God loves a genealogy moment and because then I, too, can recite in full my version of “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
The God of Altama, Vinola, Veronica, and me. We are enough—but we are not all.
To see the tribes and nations that formed us, remembered in our cadences, our music, our coping ways, our birthing ways, our burying ways. To press my soles into the soil of redeemed remembered land; unfathomable foundness.
I long for the unwritten part; revelation. When the coal touches my mouth not because I am a woman of unclean lips but because God desires my complete praise from a loosed tongue; because the Spirit inspires utterances unfettered by colonialism; because this language lost to me is a prodigal longing to come home.
And then, I will sing! I will sing to Yahweh in every language I know and should have known. I will sing the rhythms of my grandfathers, the meter of my grandmothers, the range of laughing children. I will sing and the chasm formed by empire will be a distant memory; for every valley of grief will be pulled up and every mountain of trauma will be leveled. Freedom and wholeness will be my song and my praise will reflect the shalom work of God.
There’s a song echoing in my blood. Unburied. A hum for now, until I know the words. Pulls me up and around and plays like a playground chant when the world is white noise. Moans a canopy of love over me when the world is burning. I know it’s there because I am here.
There is a song whose words I don’t yet know. I’ll sing the lyrics of this life in the meantime, until it’s time.
The thought of that song - the words, the language, the freedom, the loosed tongue - all of it makes me . . . shake in anticipation. I can't wait for that day. And I long for it - for the ways that it will make everything sad untrue, while also giving those sad things their due. Jesus come quickly, and give us songs to sing that we can't even fathom on this side.