Yesterday, Tim, First Church’s choir director, sang one of my favorite hymns at our Seagull and Snowbird gathering. As usual, It is Well with My Soul took me beyond knowledge to insight. It released the part of me that needed to be in tune with God.
Lately, I have been struggling with some the challenges of ministry. Because I am the one who is often thought to have the answers, I forget to ask the questions that help maintain a healthy perspective on what is happening in my life and I cannot truthfully say that it has been “well with my soul.” I often feel an urgency to answer God’s call in my life and become impatient, overbearing and abrupt when events aren’t unfolding as I think they should. I forget that God’s time, kairos, is different than that linear process that directs so much of my thinking. “When sorrows like sea billows roll” I need to refocus and know that “my sin…is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more.”
Music is the one thing which I cannot hide from my soul. It touches my pain, my hope and my faith. It gives me something that I need for the journey, God’s justifying grace. Then, “it is well with my soul.”
2 comments:
Don't you just want to throw bricks at the temple when you are compelled to spend so much of your life arranging chronos that many opportunities to glimpse kairos trickle mockingly through your clutching fingers? Simplify. Simplify. Semper Fi.
Tom
This morning a visitor at our church said that when she was widowed, music said the things she could not find words for. Music can be the voice of the Holy Spirit. On another note, i have found myself fighting resentment all Lent because the business of doing Lent is more than the experience of Lent...
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