A Quiet Place

At right: our cat and my rocker. He knows he's forbidden to sit in it, and right after I took this photo he jumped off.

Somewhere between disinfect-the-bathroom and fold-the-third-basket-of-laundry I got a strong SIT WITH ME message. Tired of staring at the rain on the back porch, the cat had come in, snacked in his feeding corner, and now sat plum in the middle of the living room. That’s a dangerous traffic area when I’m rampaging around doing house chores. I reached down to move him to his sleeping corner when the vibrating started.

“Okay, I get the hint,” I told him (which probably sounded like whump ork hooop whump, as in the adult voices for Charlie Brown movies). I sat down in my favorite rocker, positioned him in my lap, and started petting him. Soon, besides purring loudly, he was “kneading” with his right paw—a cat-thing of opening and closing a paw (and extending the claws) to indicate contentment. After about five minutes of getting his “love bucket” filled, he was ready to check out of life in his sleeping corner.

While I was tending to the cat’s emotional needs, for some reason an old hymn came to mind: “Near to the Heart of God.” I mentally chewed on the hymn title and a few of its phrases, like “There is a place of quiet rest” and “Hold us who wait before thee.”

This blue tweed rocker is also the place where I nestle “near to the heart of God.” I keep draped over its back a crocheted “prayer shawl” that someone made for me when I was laid up with a broken ankle. I wrap myself in that shawl when I want to spend some time in my “quiet place,” akin to the lap of God, reading my Bible and praying.

When I was a little girl, my dad had a favorite rocker—a spring-action platform rocker with nubby red tapestry upholstery and wooden hand grips. There I’d come to his lap for bedtime story time. Locked in my heart are the tender memories of leaning back into his chest, hearing his voice rumble the words and feeling the kalump, kalump of his heart.

Perhaps that precious memory is why “Near to the Heart of God” is special to me. Not until recently did I learn the story behind that hymn. In 1903, Dr. Cleland McAfee, a Presbyterian pastor in Chicago, received the stunning news that his two nieces had just died from diphtheria. He opened his Bible and prayed over his grief, and sensed the words to this hymn coming to him. On the day of his nieces’ double funeral, the new hymn was sung outside the quarantined home of his grieving brother.

McAfee’s hymn (the only one for which he’s known) is not the only hymn birthed out of anguish. Many of those hymns we hold so dear came about when people who loved God had to wrestle with the difficult things in life. Because they worked through their issues “near to the heart of God,” we are blessed with a legacy of musical tools for public and private worship.

Has a certain hymn become meaningful to you? I'd love to hear from you.