I need every hymn I can get today. I think I must’ve used this one already, but for the time being, it’s the one I want–Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.
I need to do some of that leaning.
So it’s off to the nursing home today, and probably my aunt won’t notice that I’m there. She hasn’t, lately.
Ah! One of those old hymns from Sunday school.
How soothing it is–and this morning I really need it.
This is one of those days when, for every errand you finish, two more take its place. Go to the doctor. (Danger of amputation averted.) Replace windshield wiper blade. Go to Wal-Mart for prescription. Go to Wegman’s to replenish special supplies that I can’t get anywhere else. Try to squeeze in a blog post. Go to Stop & Shop for weekly grocery order. Ach du lieber! It’s already going on 12:30 and I haven’t been to Stop & Shop yet.
Eat breakfast and call it lunch. Blog post. Write News With Views column. Vacuum the living room. And don’t forget to give the cat her medicine.
Is it really only Monday?
Sing louder! Praise the Lord!
A reader suggested this last night, so I saved it for this morning: O Sacred Head Now Wounded, by Johann Sebastian Bach.
This was another one we sang in seventh-grade chorus. Let me see if I can remember the words.
O sacred head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down
Now scornfully surrounded, with thorns thine only crown
O sacred head, what glory! What bliss till now was thine
Yet tho’ despised and gory, I’d joy to call thee mine…
Let’s close out this day with Eternal Father, Strong to Save–not only the hymn of the United States Navy, but of all those, everywhere, who go down to the sea in ships.
I’ve never been to see, but my father was a Navy man. He never spoke of what it was really like to be on a fragile little ammunition supply ship on the vast ocean, with Japanese submarines on the loose. But I loved to look at the pictures he brought home.
The sea is hard, the sea is cruel. No man can tame it. But the sea does have a master: the Lord of Hosts, who created it and established its boundaries, who raises storms and quiets them: who says to the great waters, “Peace, be still.”
Praise Him, praise Him, all that draw breath.
Erlene, welcome back to this blog audience. This is the hymn which you say brings down your blood pressure–I’ll Rise Again, by Dallas Holm. We should all have a couple of hymns that do that for us. We need them.
We stand in the watch-tower, sounding the alarm bell. God will not blame us if no one listens. But He will blame us if we remain silent.
I bought my bike in the first place, a few months ago, because my dentist wouldn’t give me a cleaning on account of my high blood pressure. I didn’t want to go on blood pressure medicine, so I got a bike instead and rode it every day. After a month or so of that, my pressure was jim-dandy.
Today in the doctor’s office the nurse checked my pressure again. “It’s going to be high,” I told her. “I’m at the doctor’s and I’m in pain.” And sure enough, it was very high.
But the doctor wasn’t satisfied. After I thought we were done, she said, “You know what? Let me check your pressure again. I think you might have what we call ‘white coat pressure.’ It goes up whenever you face a medical procedure.” But everything else, she added, appeared to be just fine.
So she checked it again, and it was high again. “You’re a Christian,” she said. “Think of something that makes you happy.”
The first thing that popped into my head was a hymn, Revive Us Again, complete with auto-harp and guitar. (You can find that hymn posted elsewhere on this blog.) And after 30 seconds or so, the doctor said, “Aha! Now it’s going down, just like I thought it would. You don’t have true hypertension. You have white coat high blood pressure.”
Well, that was good news.
If you’ve got a blood pressure monitor handy, you might want to try this at home. Or you could just take my word for it.
From G. F. Handel’s The Messiah, this is Who is the King of Glory?, performed by the Crown College Choir.
I heard a Bible lesson on the radio once. Read these three Psalms back-to-back: 22, 23, and 24. Try it, go ahead. Together they teach Christ’s passion, death, and triumphant resurrection.
Hmm…. What if nobody wants to open the gates, when the King of Glory is ready to come in?
I don’t think you want to be there when that happens.
Some of you will remember this hymn as the title music for The Vicar of Dibley, an exceptionally raunchy British comedy series.
But this is a lovely hymn, it’s the 23rd Psalm set to music, here performed by the choir of Wells Cathedral.
If this hymn doesn’t stir your soul, I don’t know what will.
My thanks to reader Linda Sorci for telling me about these psalms set to music, on Esther Mul’s youtube channel. And thank you, too, Esther.
Let me close out my blogging today with this psalm. Lord willing, I’ll be back tomorrow.Pray this poor mangled elbow lets me sleep tonight!
Worthy is the Lamb, by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir–see Revelation 5, in which only the Lamb, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Jesus Christ Our Lord, is worthy to open the sealed book.
And He is also worthy of all our love, our trust, our obedience, our fear, and we rejoice in Him Our Redeemer is mighty!