God Thou Art Love

I better post before the month ends and January 2006 doesn't show up on my archives. Of course I could always manipulate it and change the date, but I think I'll post since I've had complaints on my lack of posting.

I remember singing God Thou Art Love at Calvary during the service last fall, deep in depression. It is so moving and lifting for me to sing it again now in light of where I am now and all off the joy that is in me right now in my life. By random chance (or perhaps not so much chance and more divine intervention,) the couple that this song was written for who are at Ouchita Baptist University were at Calvary last weekend when we sang it again in worship. They were in town moving their daughter in for law school. This song was compossed for them after the loss of their middle daughter. She was returning with a group who had been in Europe doing mission work. Their pilot made a bad judgement while landing a plane in rain and seven of the people on that trip died.

God Thou Art Love was a poem by Robert Browning and put to notes by a well-known chorale composer, Craig Courtney. A love of the stuff he does brings me to tears. Hearing the song is so much better than just reading the lyrics, but the lyrics are still powerful. Here they are:

If I forget, yet God remembers.
If these hands of mine cease from their clinging,
Yet the hands divine hold me so firmly, I cannot fall.
And if sometimes I am too tired to call for Him to help me,
Then He reads the prayer unspoken in my heart and lifts my care.

I dare not fear since certainly I know,
That I am in God's keeping
Shielded so, from all that else would harm.
And in the hour of stern temptation,
strengthened by his power.

I tread no path in life to Him unknown.
I lift no burden, bear no pain alone;
My soul a calm sure hiding place has found:
The everlasting arms my life surround,
My life surround!

God thou art love!
I build my faith on that.
I know thee who has kept my path.
And made light for me in the darkness
Tempering sorrow so that it reached me like a solemn joy. (<-- what an amazing line!!)
It were too strange that I should doubt thy love.