The End Of The Tape

Hakim learned the oud in a room above a carpenter's shop, which meant every lesson he ever had came with the smell of glue and cedar dust coming up through the floorboards, and the sound of a saw starting and stopping underneath the music.

His teacher was a small, dry old man named Butros who had taught for forty years and had one rule: no talking about the music. Play it or do not play it.

In winter the pegs slipped and the old man would tune the instrument on his knee twice in an hour without breaking off what he was saying. Hakim, at seventeen, thought that was the most impressive thing he had ever seen a human being do.

Near the end, when Butros was too tired to teach for a whole hour, he did something odd. He borrowed a cassette recorder from the carpenter downstairs and recorded himself playing, straight through, the six pieces Hakim was working on. An hour of it. He handed it over in a case with a strip of masking tape on the spine and one word written on it in blue pen: LISTEN.

Butros died in the spring.

And Hakim listened.

Every evening for nine years, in a small apartment with the window open in summer and shut in winter, he put on that tape and sat and listened to a dead man play the six pieces. He could tell you where the old man's breath caught before the fourth one. He could tell you which note in the second piece had a fingernail click on it.

The oud stayed in its case under the bed. He took it out perhaps twice a year, played four bars, decided it sounded like a boy pretending, and put it back.

Then one evening the kettle boiled.

He got up to deal with it, and he did not press stop, and the tape ran on past the end of the sixth piece into what he had always assumed was blank.

It was not blank.

There was a shuffling sound, a chair, and then Butros's voice, very close to the microphone and slightly out of breath, the way he sounded when he had climbed the stairs.

"Hakim. If you are hearing this, you have let it run all the way to the end, which means you have played this thing more times than is good for you."

Hakim stood in the kitchen with the kettle screaming.

"Put it down and play. I did not record this so you would have my hands. I recorded it so you would know what you were reaching for."

A pause. The sound of the old man settling back in a chair that Hakim knew the exact creak of.

"Play badly. Play badly for a year. That is how every single one of us did it, including me, and nobody is standing there with a list."

Then a click, and hiss, and nothing.

Nine years.

You know the recording I mean. It is on your phone. Four minutes of a man praying, taped at a kitchen table at somebody's birthday, or in a hospital hallway when you asked him to say it once more so you would have it, or a voice memo from a night when everything was falling apart and he prayed and it held you up.

And you play it. At the end of the day, in the car, at three in the morning.

You play it instead of praying.

Why you press play instead

I know why, and it is not laziness, and I want you to hear that in the first sentence.

You press play because his prayers sound like they arrive somewhere. Yours sound like they are still in the room. He has the words for it, the rhythm of it, the pauses in the right places, and when he says God's name it sounds like a name and not a word. And somewhere along the line, without ever deciding it, you concluded that God is used to hearing from him and not particularly used to hearing from you.

That is the ache, and I am not going to talk you out of it with an argument. I am going to put something under it.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Look who that is addressed to. Ye people. Not the singers. Not the ones with the voice. David is a king with a harp and a lifetime of psalms behind him, and when he turns to say the important thing he does not say "pray like me." He says pour out your heart, all of you, everybody in the square.

And the phrase he uses is not a technique. To pour out is what you do to a jar. You tip it until it is empty and you do not arrange the contents on the way out.

And you have your own access to God tonight, direct, with nobody standing in the middle of it, because He opened it Himself and He has never once closed it. That is not my encouragement to you: the written word calls Him a refuge for us and hands the pouring out to everybody in earshot, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true of the person holding the phone rather than true in general.

Tipping the jar

Here is what I think has happened to your praying.

You have started editing. You get one sentence out and you hear how it sounded, and you go back and start it again, better. That is not prayer, that is drafting, and nobody can do it for long without giving up and reaching for a recording of somebody who never seems to need a second attempt.

But a jar tipped over does not sort itself out first. It comes out in the order it went in, and some of it is sediment.

And the plainest sentence you own is admissible, all of it, unarranged, because He asked for the pouring out and not for the wording. Scripture puts no vocabulary requirement anywhere near that verse, and the Spirit is the one who takes a sentence that comes out sideways and carries it in whole.

Play badly. Pray badly. For a year, if that is what it takes.

The man on the tape is not the problem

Let me be very clear, because this is where a message like this goes wrong and does harm.

That man is a gift. He is not a crutch, he is not a middleman you need to get out from under, and nothing in this message is a reason to think less of him or to stop asking him to pray. If he is still alive, keep him. Call him. Ask him again this week.

What Butros wanted was never to be listened to. It was for the boy to play. That is what every genuinely good teacher, pastor, parent and friend has ever wanted, and if you asked yours plainly they would tell you the same thing in about four seconds.

And you are not being asked to outgrow anybody, because direct access was never independence and it never made a person self sufficient. The word makes every believer a priest with their own way in and puts them all in one body at the same time, and His Spirit does both of those at once without any strain at all.

Keep the tape. Let it run to the end.