I’ve been kind of on the outs with God lately. Not serious “I quit this religion” outs, but more like how when you and your best friend have a falling out over a book club choice or something and you then speak either grudgingly or in too-polite formalities.
For one reason and another I’ve just not been at the place where I’m talking with God much.
So I was watching “House” the other night (see, I really AM getting to the Hugh Laurie part) and there was a scene where Mr. Laurie-as-Dr. House was playing the best version of “What A Friend (We Have in Jesus)”. And I just lost it. Right there on the couch, crying like a baby and rewinding that thirty seconds of show over and over again.
I first heard that song at my Grandmother’s church when I was a child. We visited her church a lot and it seems they only sang WAF, Count Your Many Blessings and How Great Thou Art. They were all nice songs, but they weren’t my favourite.
After the House thing I popped in Mahalia’s version, because I’m a firm believer in the law that if Mahalia ever sang a hymn, her version is the best.
Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged; Take it to the Lord in prayer!
Can we find a friend so faithful, who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness. Take it to the Lord in prayer!
It was like I was hearing those same words for the first time in the little Kewanna Baptist Church. Instead of being a rote recitation, it hit me that these were the brave soldiering words sung by careworn people in a little farming town. People who had fought harder to climb hills I can’t even imagine. Who lost siblings as babies, went hungry through the Depression and knew the hard song of the auctioneer selling their memories at a cut-rate to pay off the bank.
It makes me feel stupid for being mad about my own relatively minimal problems.
Kat, your words blessed me tonight.
And me as well. It’s easy to forget just how easy we relatively have it, when mired in our own problems.
My mom (and dad) was of that generation too. This was one of her favorite songs. She used to play it on the piano and sing it after we’d gone to bed, during her private worship time at the end of the day. I often fell asleep to this song; my mom’s playing and singing after a hard day of her own. She too lived through the depression, through molestation at 14, and violence in her home growing up; through two miscarriages, four kids, two major wars in which her husband fought and was wounded, hundreds of moves here in the States and overseas with the Army and dozens more as a minister’s wife…. it never ceases to amaze me what my mom lived through and still managed somehow to hang on to her deep faith in God.
As a kid this song was kind of boring to me; I was into the “contemporary Christian music”. But the older I get, the more fond I grow of these old hymns, and the gritty truth they speak.
Thanks for sharing the Mahalia link; I’ve been listening to it as I type. And thanks for sharing with us this little glimpse into you.
FYI, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” is #154 in the 2008 Baptist Hymnal.