EASTER'S GARDEN

At a neighbor's home, half a block from my home, is a wonderful sidewalk

 corner display of daffodils. The  trumpeted flowers appropriately bloom around 

Easter. I was given some daffodil bulbs about a decade ago but for some reason 

they quit blooming though they share a planter with tulips that always do.

Maybe someday I'll solve that mystery!

Be encouraged by the story behind a beloved Easter hymn.
Picture yourself beside Mary Magdalene in the early morning at the Garden of Gethsemane.  You’re awash in deep grief over your Leader’s awful, undeserved, execution by crucifixion.  The least you can do is follow the customs of anointing his wrapped corpse with spices. But something—something wonderful—happened.

Fast-forward almost two thousand years to the cramped darkroom of a Philadelphia man named Austin Miles.  He’d trained to be a pharmacist but also had music training and some success having hymns published. So, giving up his pharmacist’s career at age 24, he went to work for a Christian music publishing company. Its talented founder was Adam Geibel, a German-born music genius, blinded since youth, and known for his organ-playing.  Dr. Geibel asked Miles to write a hymn text that would be “sympathetic in tone, breathing tenderness in every line; one that would bring hope to the hopeless, rest for the weary, and down pillows to dying beds.”

INSPIRED IN A DARKROOM
So one day in March 1912, Miles was seeking inspiration as he sat in his photographic darkroom where he also kept a little organ.  He took his Bible and it opened to John 20, his favorite chapter--“whether by chance or inspiration,” he later wrote, “let the reader decide. That meeting of Jesus and Mary had lost none of its power to charm.”

His recollection continued: “My hands were resting on the Bible while I stared at the light blue wall. As the light faded, I seemed to be standing at the entrance of a garden, looking down a gently winding path, shaded by olive branches.  A woman in white, with head bowed, hand clasping her throat, as if to choke back her sobs, walked slowly into the shadows.  It was Mary.  As she came to the tomb, upon which she placed her hand, she bent over to look in, and hurried away.”

Next , it seemed, he saw John and Peter looking into the tomb. When they left, Mary reappeared and wept before turning and seeing Jesus standing nearby.  Kneeling before Him, arms outstretched, she looked into His face and cried, “Rabboni!”

Miles continued: “I awakened in full light, gripping the Bible, with muscles tense and nerves vibrating. Under the inspiration of this vision I wrote as quickly as words could be formed the poem exactly as it has since appeared.  That same evening I wrote the music.”*

Along with “The Old Rugged Cross,” this song was widely sung in the Billy Sunday evangelistic campaigns, with Homer Rodeheaver as song leader.

As for Miles, biographies say nothing about whether he married and had a family. But writing Christian music became his passion and ministry. By one account, he wrote some 537 hymn texts until his death in 1946 at age 78. “In the Garden” became his most famous, placed in more than 200 hymnals. Some of his other better-known hymns: “Dwelling in Beulah Land,” “Sweeter as the Days Go By,” “I Have a Friend,” “Wide, Wide as the Ocean,” and “A New Name in Glory” (featured in a 1998 Gaither Homecoming video series).

But by far, his most famous work is the one inspired while he sat in a darkroom, about history’s life-changing, death-conquering miracle in a garden cemetery in Jerusalem.


*This account appeared in Forty Gospel Stories (George W. Sanville, 1943), and was also quoted in 101 Hymn Stories (Kenneth Osbeck, 1982), and Then Sings My Soul (Robert Morgan, 2003).