BackstageThe serenata always begins as a conspiracy.
You gather in the dark, several of you, while the person you have come for is still deep asleep and knows nothing. You keep your voices down on the way. Somebody carries the guitar; somebody else is only there to clap and cannot be trusted to stay quiet; there is always one cousin who insists he is going to sing the high harmony and always one who begs him not to. You arrive under the window while the street is still that deep blue that is not quite night and not yet morning, and you look up at the dark glass, and on a breath, all together, you begin.
And here is the thing about the serenata that I have never gotten over, even after singing dozens of them. You do not sing to a person who is awake. You sing to wake them. The whole point is that the first thing they experience of the new day, before their eyes are even open, before they have washed their face or remembered their troubles or braced for whatever the day holds, is a voice — several voices — under their window, in the cold and the dark, telling them they are loved.
The day begins with a song that got there before they did.
I have sung a girl awake on her birthday and watched the lamp come on behind the curtain and then the curtain move and then a face appear, sleep-creased and startled and slowly breaking into the kind of smile you do not get any other way. I have sung Las Mañanitas to an old woman who wept in her doorway in her robe because no one had done it for her in forty years. And every single time, the miracle is the same and it is this: love arrived while she was still asleep. She did not earn it awake. It was already outside her window, tuning up in the dark, before she had done one single thing that day to deserve it.
David woke the dawn on purpose
There is a line in the Psalms that I did not understand until I had sung enough serenatas, and now I cannot read it any other way. David, in a season when his heart is fixed and steady, calls out to his own soul to wake up, and he tells his instruments to wake up, and then he says the most audacious thing — I myself will awake the dawn.
Not: I will wait for the dawn and then praise. Not: when the sun comes up I will feel like singing. He says he is going to get up before the light, while it is still dark, and sing so early and so fiercely that his song will be the thing that rouses the morning. He is going to serenade the sunrise. He is going to sing the day awake instead of waiting for the day to grant him permission to sing.
That is the boldest posture of worship I know, and it is exactly the posture of the serenata. You do not sing because conditions are good. You sing into the dark to make the good conditions arrive. You get up before there is any evidence of morning and you lift your voice as though the light were already on the way — because it is, because it always is, because the God who made the mornings has never once failed to send one.
I think many of us have it backward. We wait to feel the dawn before we will sing. We say, when this lifts, when the diagnosis is better, when the money comes, when I feel God again — then I will worship. David says no. Awake the dawn. Be the voice under the window of your own dark night, singing the morning up before it has shown its face. The song does not come after the light. In David's practice, the song comes first, and the light comes because someone was willing to sing in the dark.
He is already outside your window
But here is the turn I most want you to have, because it is the sweeter half.
You are not only meant to be the one who sings the serenata. You are meant to know that one is being sung to you.
There is a mercy in the Scriptures that arrives fresh every single morning, before you have done anything to earn the day. The prophet says it plainly: the compassions of Yahuah are new every morning, and great is His faithfulness. New every morning. Which means that while you were asleep, while you were doing nothing, while your troubles were still waiting for you on the other side of waking — the mercy for this exact day was already being prepared and set outside your window. You did not wake up and then receive it. It was there before your eyes opened, like a voice in the dark street, like cousins with a guitar who could not wait for you to be ready.
And there is another word, one of my favorites, that says Yahuah your God is in your midst, and He will rejoice over you with gladness, and He will quiet you with His love, and He will sing over you. He sings over you. The God of the universe conducts serenatas. While you sleep in your worst season, convinced you are alone and unwatched and unwanted, there is a voice under the window of your soul, and it is His, and it is singing you toward a morning you did not believe would come.
Sing into the blue hour
So let me leave you where the serenata always leaves me — standing in the cold blue dark, before there is any light, with a song on my lips anyway.
If you are in a night right now, one of the long ones, I am not going to tell you the sun is out. It is not. But I am going to tell you what the serenata knows and what David practiced and what the mercies of God prove every single day: the song does not have to wait for the morning. You can sing the morning up. You can stand under the window of your own dark and lift your voice as though love were already on its way, and it will feel like a conspiracy, and it will feel too early, and your voice will be a little cracked from the cold.
Sing anyway. That is how the dawn has always been woken. And listen — under the noise of your own singing, listen close — there is another voice out there in the dark that got to your window first, and has been singing over you the whole time, waiting for you to wake up and hear it.
The lamp is about to come on, mi gente. Keep singing. Morning is closer than the dark would have you believe.
