Singing when you least feel like it

A dark cloud of gloom over “people problems” hung over me as I started my errands the other day. Then, just blocks from home, the words of an old hymn welled up within me and I was soon singing:

Come Thou fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing thy praise.
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.

Hymn histories fascinate me, and I learned this one was composed in 1758 by Robert Robinson, a 23-year-old pastor who just three years earlier left a life of drinking and gangs to follow Christ. Written specifically for his Pentecost Sunday sermon, it is the best known of his two published hymns.  As for “Tune thy heart to sing thy praise,” I’d often heard that the best antidote for sadness and worry is to sing praises to God.  The other morning, thinking of this hymn, I tried coming up with an acrostic for PRAISE:  Here’s one:

            Prayerfully

            Releasing

            All

            Inexplicable problems to the

            Savior’s

            Eternal perspective

Song has a way of expressing the deepest parts of us.  Recently while reading Beth Moore’s To Live is Christ (Broadman, 2001), I was profoundly touched by a story she told of entering into a friend’s excruciating grief. This friend’s 15-year-old son was killed in an auto accident. Moore and two other women went with the grieving mother to the mortuary to choose a casket. Afterwards, they drove away, saying nothing for several blocks.  Then one friend began singing the contemporary chorus, “I love you, Lord.” A second friend joined in, and finally Beth Moore. At that point I had to put down the book, tears in my eyes as I imagined myself in that car as friends, voices broken by grief, lifted up Jesus! Moore added: “When praise is the last thing that comes naturally to us and we choose to worship Him anyway, we’ve had the privilege of offering a genuine sacrifice of praise” (To Live is Christ, p. 96).

The problems that prompted my unexpected recall of a classic praise-hymn  haven’t gone away. But God continues to teach me about His love and power. As the end of that hymn’s first stanza says:

Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of God’s unchanging love.