Hearing a Soul Mid-Sentence

There are songs that arrive already sorted out. Clean lines. Clear message. You know where the singer stands by the second verse, and nothing in the bridge is going to change that.

And then there are songs that sound more like a man sitting at a kitchen table early in the morning, coffee going cold, trying to make sense of himself.

I have come to appreciate the second kind more with age.

Lately I have been listening to “Elegy” by Leif Vollebekk off his Twin Solitude album. It is not a “Christian song” in any formal sense. There is no tidy conclusion, no clear confession, no resolution you can underline and say, “There it is.”

But there is language in it that I cannot help but recognize.

Repentance. Presence. Light. Debt.

Not as doctrines, but as fragments. As something remembered, or perhaps something being rediscovered.

I believe Scripture tells us that God has written His law on the heart. That a man does not need a catechism in front of him to know, at some point, that there are debts he has not paid. He may not use the word “sin,” but he will speak of owing something, of having done wrong, of needing to make it right.

That recognition matters to me.

In the song, the line that stays with me is simple:

“I am not done with repentance.”

There is no explanation attached to it. No system behind it. Just an admission that something in him still needs turning.

That is not a finished testimony. But it is not nothing, either.

In my younger years, I tended to listen for clarity. I wanted a song to say exactly what it meant, and to mean something I could agree with from beginning to end. If it did not, I moved on.

These days, I listen a little differently.

I listen for awareness.

For the moment a man stops excusing himself. For the moment he senses that there is something beyond him. For the moment he realizes that feeling something is not the same as being changed.

Those are small things, but they are not insignificant. I believe it is God who grants repentance. That He brings things to mind. Shines light where there used to be none. Unsettles what we had learned to live with.

That work, I think, often begins quietly.

Not in a sermon. Not in a conversion story told from the end. But somewhere in the middle, when a man is still trying to find his words.

That is what this song sounds like to me.

Not a declaration. More like a reckoning.

There are other details in the lyrics that hint at a life shaped, at least in part, by the church. Stained glass windows. Sanctuary wine. Rosary beads. These are not abstract symbols. They belong to places, to rooms, to moments where something sacred was close enough to touch.

He remembers it. And memory has a way of working on a person.

You also hear, running underneath it all, a sense of weakness. He does not present himself as strong or disciplined. He admits, in his own way, that resolve is fragile. That a man can know better and still fail to do better.

That, too, is true to life.

What the song does not give us is resolution. There is no clear statement of forgiveness, no settled peace. There is grief, there is loss, and there is a thin line of hope that reaches beyond death toward reunion. It is not explained. It is simply held onto.

And I find myself leaving it there.

I do not need to make the song say more than it says. But I also do not need to pretend that these themes are empty just because they are not fully formed.

Sometimes what you are hearing is not a conclusion, but a man being brought to one.

Somewhere between what he was and what he will become.

Scripture gives me the clarity that a song like this does not. It tells me plainly what sin is, what repentance means, and where forgiveness is found. That clarity is a gift. It anchors me. It keeps me from mistaking feeling for truth.

But it also helps me recognize something else.

The early movements.

The half-spoken sentences. The unsettled conscience. The awareness that something is wrong, and that it is not yet made right.

Those are not the end of the story.

But they are often where it begins.

And if you listen closely, you can hear it there.

A soul, not finished, not resolved, but no longer asleep.

Mid-sentence.