glenna marshall

Ordinary Sunday

“Church today,” I wrote in my journal early Sunday morning. “I could really use the fellowship. I’m feeling low.” I put down my pen. I hadn’t slept much. It was a relief to know I’d soon be among my church family, distracted from the interior concerns running through my mind. Better than distracted, I knew I’d be filled.

It was an ordinary Sunday, not unlike the one the week before and the week before that and the week before that. Attendance is still a little low following the last two years of openings and closures, but we’re rallying, slowly and surely. Every week, our time together as the people of God unrolls in a predictable pattern: worship through song, corporate prayer, the preaching of the Word, communion, fellowship. Maybe to some it feels maddeningly repetitive, but lately, the rhythms of weekly corporate worship feel like a sustaining lifeline of support to me. I began my Sunday at the piano for a quick run through of the songs with the other musicians. That half hour together of singing and praying together feels like an injection of peace. Ah, an internal sigh. I’m here. We’re here.

From there, I make sure my children are in their classes before heading to my own. It’s a small group this week, but our discussion of Psalm 22 infuses me with joy. When it comes time to read Psalm 22, one of our older church members immediately volunteers. He’s there with his wife, who is also his caregiver. Alzheimer’s has been a cruel and unwelcome guest, but it has not yet robbed my brother of his ability to read. His voice is deep and warm, the words spilling out with familiarity. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast,” he reads. “But you, O Lord, do not be far off!” I am a witness in that small classroom at 9:30 on a Sunday morning: there is power in the Word of the Lord.

people singing in church

I chat with a friend in the foyer, catch up with another while washing our hands in the restroom. They are small conversations but full of the important stuff. How are you feeling? Did you get a chance to talk to so-and-so? What did the doctor say? I’ve been praying for you. I pause midway through the sanctuary to greet some visitors, and again to talk with one of our widows. My thirteen-year-old is running the projector and sound system, my six-year-old is safely tucked into our pew. Again, I take my place at the piano while my husband picks up his guitar. Scripture is read and we sing, but this time the sanctuary is filled with the voices of my family. Even from the piano, I can hear Gary, eleven months out from burying his wife, our beloved Sue. He sings his heart out, hands raised. “Death could not hold You down, You are the risen King.” I know him well enough to know there are tears in his eyes. He misses his wife, and he praises the Lord for His faithfulness. I am a witness to the ways grief and praise can coexist in the house of the Lord.

One of my pastors takes requests from the church and then spends fifteen minutes praying over them. The requests are frank and difficult, and I know better how to love my people through prayer. Week after week we pray for healing for Mark and for me; week after week we pray for salvation for our prodigals. One of our elders-in-training picks up where we left off in the book of Ezra. Tyrone preaches with more joy than anyone I know. He has a pretty wild salvation story, and though I didn’t know him before he came to faith, I know that his joy is not of this world. No one has ever been so excited about a letter from Artaxerxes. I am a witness to the power of prayer, the power of the Word proclaimed, the power of the gospel to wake a dead heart. We take communion together as we do every week. And in between wrangling my energetic kindergartener and sipping from the cup, I call out in my heart as I expect everyone does, “Lord, this is all grace.”

Near the end of the service a father walks his daughter to the front. Tears shimmer in her eyes for the weight of what’s in her heart. She believes in Jesus! We knew she’d been wrestling with what she believed but today was the day of her public profession and we rejoiced as a family for a dead heart made alive in Christ. I try to hold back my tears but think, Of all the reasons not to hold back your tears, this is the best. I hug her, call her my sister though she is young enough to be my daughter. I am a witness to the wonder of salvation and rebirth in a life forever changed by Jesus.

There are more conversations on the way out. I find a blank envelope floating at the top of my purse that someone slipped in without my knowledge. It is filled with cash. I try to guess but know that’s not the point. The point is you are loved. I head for the parking lot, hollering for my kids to meet me at the car. I sit in the driver’s seat for a moment. It was an ordinary Sunday, just a regular, run-of-the-mill Sunday. But I am filled. Restored. Refreshed. Don’t get me wrong. I walked out of that church building with the self-same circumstances I carried into it. Nothing has changed. And yet, there is nothing I needed more than all these ordinary people speaking extraordinary truth into my life. Throughout the week, the culture yells long and loud and wrong. My inner monologue can sink to the level of despair so quickly. I need ordinary Sundays to remember what is true. Jesus is King, and He loves me.

Suffering is a difficult path to traverse. We all know the valleys of the Christian life, however differently they are manifested in our individual circumstances. To long for the fellowship of my church family when life is hard has not always been my default response. I know what it is to want to circle the wagons at home, to hibernate in isolation until life settles down or until I feel inspired to attend. But the church is one of the primary gifts of grace God has given us to survive seasons of suffering. He knew life would be hard for us, and He gave us the church to endure it. I know that now more than I ever have. After church on Sunday, I told my husband, “I feel sad for those who have moved to the fringes of church life. They don’t know what they’re missing.” And you won’t know it right away. You may not catch it in a few weeks or even months of attending. Like all the means of grace God has given us for endurance, it’s the cumulative effect of digging in over time that changes us. It may take a long time for ordinary to seem miraculous, but I am a witness to the sustaining grace God has given us in regular, ordinary Sundays. Miracles abound.

 

It may take a long time for ordinary to seem miraculous, but I am a witness to the sustaining grace God has given us in regular, ordinary Sundays. Miracles abound. Share on X

 

Photo by Pedro Lima on Unsplash

 

The Manna is Always There

I have a plastic bin filled with beans hidden in my basement.

I packed that bin two years ago when I, like everyone else, worried about food supplies. I’ve borrowed from the bin a little, but if you need rice or dried beans, I’ve got you covered. I also have gallons of water in case “The Big One” they’re always predicting rocks the New Madrid Fault Line like it did in 1811. (I do not love living on top of this particular seismic zone.) I’m not a hoarder or a prepper, exactly, because that’s about all I’ve got stored away, but I regularly consider stocking up with today’s supplies to cover tomorrow’s potential emergency. There is wisdom in being prepared, but most of my decisions about potential looming disasters are made from fear, not wisdom. Maybe there won’t be enough of what I need tomorrow, so I’m going to worry about it today.

_______

“I don’t know how I’m going to make it through another two weeks of this,” I gasped to my husband between sobs. The ER nurse was unhooking my IV and blood pressure cuff. All we knew is what wasn’t wrong with me. The pain was intense; I couldn’t wrap my head around all the days on the calendar before I could follow up with a physician and get more tests. I put my fists to my eyes. I traced the vein standing out in the middle of my forehead. I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do this.

But I did do it. Not because I have superhuman strength in my bones or deep wells of stoic longsuffering to draw from. Every morning, there was a fresh supply of mercy and grace to carry me through the day. Just that day. Just one single day at a time. No hoarding, no prepping, no stocking up for next week’s pain or next month’s doctor visit. When I told a close friend that I could only pray for God to sustain me today, she said to me, “Manna for today. The Lord will give you what you need.”

During their wilderness wanderings, the Israelites had to gather God’s provision each morning to sustain their bodies, but barring the Sabbath preparations, they couldn’t fill their pantries or hide a bin of manna in the basement. Stockpiled manna rotted and decayed, writhing with worms and mistrust in God’s care for them[1]. Carrying out a putrid mess of yesterday’s wormy manna from your tent was proof that you didn’t really trust the Lord to keep His word. There was something here for them to see: the Lord’s mercies were new every morning, and they could trust Him to supply what they needed. Every day that they opened their eyes to the morning desert sun, they had to trust that He would keep His word to sustain them again. It was a very literal exercise in growing their trust in God’s care for them.

basket with grains in it

“I’m frustrated for you,” someone said to me recently. “Countless people are praying for you, but we’re not seeing the answer we want.”

My heart sank a little. I don’t want my physical pain to water the seed of unbelief in anyone’s heart. Yet, I’ve had similar conversations with the Lord lately as I’ve vacillated between two different illnesses. I have spent more collective time in doctors’ offices, emergency rooms, and in bed than at my computer working over the last month. I’ve had an army of people praying for me, and if anyone understands the defeated feeling of unanswered prayer for my health, it’s me. And yet, there’s something in this daily gathering of mercy to endure that I cannot dismiss. God knows what I need, and I wonder if what I need more than His healing grace is His sustaining grace. I need to keep tipping up my chin toward His face to ask Him for what I know He will give: Himself. He carries me.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” I told her. “But the Lord shows up when I’m weak. He gives the exact amount of grace I need when I need it. Not enough to borrow for tomorrow. Just enough for today. If He ever draws you into a situation like this, He will prove Himself faithful. I promise.”

I don’t know for sure why God withholds healing when He could easily dispense it. He must have something for me in suffering. Anything that keeps us on our faces before the Lord day and night must be something He is using for our good. There have been good days like yesterday when I took a walk and ate without pain and worked on my current manuscript with a clear mind. But there have been many bad days when I don’t leave the couch all day and sip the least offensive liquids I can find. The trouble is, though I am making gradual improvements and some normalcy has returned, I can’t predict what kind of day I’m going to have, so every morning when I open my eyes to the Missouri sun, I look for the daily supply of God’s mercy. The manna is always there, but I have to pray for eyes to see it.

Sometimes today’s mercy looks like a good day with minimal pain. Sometimes it’s knowing I’m being upheld by the prayers of the saints to endure the day. Sometimes the mercy is in the care I receive from the body of Christ. Sometimes it’s in my husband’s insistence that I rest or my son’s prayer for me to feel better. Sometimes, the manna is found when others help me look for it. It’s always there if you have eyes to see it.

I am coming to terms with the fact that life with an incurable disease will ebb and flow between seasons of healing and seasons of illness. What I really want is full trust in God’s daily provision of grace. I want it to be enough. I want Him to be enough. I know that He is, but sometimes I go to bed at night wondering if the manna will be there when I wake up. My outer self is wasting away—I feel the fragility of my flesh. But inside, He is renewing me day by day, proving that He will sustain me until I see Him.[2] If it’s in suffering that He chooses to prove Himself faithful, then that will be enough for today. He is always there.

 

God knows what I need, and I wonder if what I need more than His healing grace is His sustaining grace. Share on X

 

*Whenever I write about my health, I get numerous emails with thoughtful suggestions for remedies. I’m under the care of several health professionals and in good hands, so rather than sending recommendations, I’d love it if you’d pray for me instead. I treasure your prayers more than words can say!  

Photo by Andrea Scully on Unsplash

[1] See Exodus 16

[2] See 2 Cor. 4:16-18

There Will Be No Burden-Bearing if There Is No Burden-Sharing

I was having trouble walking that Saturday morning. Exhausted, fatigued, and discouraged, I had told my husband I couldn’t participate in the church leaf-raking service project we were doing for our widows and shut-ins. I felt embarrassed when my family left the house clad in boots and gloves and armed with rakes and leaf-blowers to join the rest of the church for an afternoon of work. Instead, I spent my afternoon moving from ice pack to heating pad to magnesium bath. “This is pretty low,” I grumbled. “Can’t even rake for a couple of hours.” Truthfully, though, it wasn’t just raking. It was not sleeping, difficulty bending over, brain fog, constant fatigue. You can’t see my disease when you look at me, but some days there’s little I can do but attempt to mitigate my pain.

A friend from church called to check on me that Saturday. She knew I’d been having a particularly rough time, and when I expressed how poorly I was doing and how embarrassed I was to miss a service project when I look completely normal to anyone watching, my friend gently rebuked me:

“First, you don’t need to worry about what people think. That’s pride. Second, I don’t think the church knows the degree of your suffering because you haven’t publicly asked for prayer. How can the church know if you don’t share? You need the church to pray for you. We are your family, and we love you. You need to let the church love you.”

I swallowed my knee-jerk defense and let her kind—but corrective—words soak in. She was right. For five Sundays in a row, I had squelched the urge to speak up during corporate prayer. Each week, I’d listened to others ask for prayer, hurt along with them when they shared their requests for healing, for restoration, for salvation of loved ones, for miracles. I told myself that everyone has problems and pain. I’m not special, says the litany in my head. Stop complaining. Speaking up is attention-seeking; I’m making more of this than it really is. I don’t think that about others, but I do think it about myself.

But, after my friend’s rebuke, I remembered the charge in James: “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord” (James 5:14).

I thought about James’s words all afternoon, even after my family returned from raking, The following Sunday morning, during corporate prayer, I worked up the nerve to obey Scripture. I blubbered through the whole thing, really. The moment I opened my mouth, it was a train wreck of a confession: pride, hard to share, chronic pain, no sleep, fourteen-month flare-up, desperate, healing, trust, God, help, losing my mind, exhausted, please. When I finished, I mopped my face with a tissue, felt my husband squeeze my arm, held my breath. I don’t know what I was expecting. Scorn? Disdain? Embarrassment? Eye-rolling? Not even close. There were numerous words of comfort and encouragement from around the sanctuary. One of our elders-in-training stood up and blessed the effort it took to be honest. The church gathered around me, laid hands on me, and prayed over me with tears on their faces and confidence in God’s ability to heal. They prayed for sleep, for reduced pain, for complete healing. They stood in line to hug me and wipe my tears away, offered to lighten my load through the holidays, promised to pray around the clock.

church people holding hands in prayer

The Lord didn’t heal me instantaneously after that prayer time. But I’ll tell you what He did do: He enveloped me with His love through the love of His people. Throughout the week, I received texts and reminders of regular prayer, thoughtful cards and gifts, even gatherings of church members praying for me without my knowledge. There have been offers to drop off food when my family visits for the holidays, offers to pick up my kids for a day here and there during winter break so I can rest, Venmo payments to cover X-rays, treatments, and therapies. Love. Love. Love.

I have been a pastor’s wife for eighteen years. For most of that time, I have lived my life in a very open way in hopes of encouraging my church to be transparent and vulnerable. I know better than most that we can’t bear burdens in the church if we don’t know what those burdens are. Paul charged the Galatian church to “bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2). We can’t do that for one another if we don’t know what the burdens are. I know this. And yet, in the last fourteen months, I’ve felt ashamed of my weaknesses, embarrassed of my limitations, and quiet about how bad things have really been. I don’t want to need help. And yet, I need it sometimes.

There will be no burden-bearing if there is no burden-sharing. The church is an extension of God’s love for us. Sometimes we have to swallow our pride, risk vulnerability, and own our weaknesses to receive it. We rob the family of God of the opportunity to love us when we hide our struggles. Why is it so difficult for some of us? Perhaps it is because we are used to being the burden-bearers. We don’t like how the shoe fits when we we’re the ones in need. It pinches with need and rubs blisters against our desire for self-sufficiency. Pride works in many mysterious ways. But God knows what we need.

In church this Sunday, I raised my hand again during corporate prayer. I thanked the church for praying, updated them on my recent scans, laughed and told them that the love of the body is almost better than a pain-free night. Almost. The pastor leading prayer prayed boldly for complete healing anyway. A friend came up to me afterwards and asked in her direct, no-nonsense way, “Why didn’t you tell me you were so sick?” I fumbled through the difficult definition of chronic illness, “It’s not sickness, exactly. It’s just—” I trailed off. It’s hard to explain. She nodded and promised, “I’m coming to your house after your extended family leaves for Christmas and cleaning it from top to bottom. You know I will.” She hugged me tightly, her brusque words a warm blanket around my aching shoulders.

________________

I have hope that I will get better in the coming months. I’m in good hands with some healthcare professionals who are also praying for me as they treat me from the inside out. I know that I will likely always deal with fair amounts of pain, though. I am tempted to panic at the thought of a future that resembles the past year. And yet, there has hardly been a year of my life when I have been so confident of God’s specific love for me. He keeps pouring it out—abundantly in the quiet of the morning with my open Bible and my heating pad, generously in the overwhelming care of my local church, in the middle of the night when I cry out for Him to be near. In some ways, it was good that I was afflicted so that I could finally see what was right in front of me. Love, love, love. If not for the gentle rebuke from a church member that Saturday, I’d have missed it all this blessedly beautiful burden-bearing.

There will be no burden-bearing if there is no burden-sharing. Share on X

 

What We Pray in the Dark

It was 1:30 a.m. Pain seared through my lower back, wrapping itself around my S. I. joints and radiating into the deepest part of my hips. I moved from bed to couch and back, rearranging the pillows a dozen times, applying ice and heat wherever I could. There was no relief. None.

Tears dripped down my cheeks as I pounded the couch cushions with my fists. Never, in ten years of living with A.S., have I hurt this much. Night after night the pain returns like a thief, robbing me of sleep, of confidence, of belief in the Lord’s love for me. Through clenched teeth, I hissed my prayer to the Lord in the dark. “Please. Make this stop.” He didn’t, though. It was quiet in the living room in the middle of the night, save the gasps and choked prayers slipping between the cracks of my faith. Discouraged and fatigued in every possible way, I prayed for the Lord to help me get through another day. If he wouldn’t stop the pain, would he please get me through the rest of the dark morning hours? He did. Somehow. The clock ticked slowly, and I survived another night of pain and crumbling faith. Somehow.

I confessed my anger to my husband when he woke the next morning. I heard my voice—the voice that has spent the last five years proclaiming God’s unfailing love for us in suffering because I thought this was a lesson learned long ago—I heard my voice say these words: “Does the Lord even care about me?” I knew they were the wrong words for there was an accusation in them. I don’t believe those words. In my head, I know the Lord cares for me, but sometimes the pain blinds me from the truth. Pain pushes the truth just out of reach, turns my face away from it just enough for me to question. Pain asks me, “Does God really love?” It always comes back to circumstances versus truth. Which one will I allow to tell me who God is? Which voice will I listen to?

It has to be him. It has to be. Like Peter and his friends standing around Jesus whose hard teaching led to a mass exodus, in my heart I know it has to be him. “Where else can I go, Lord? You alone have the words of eternal life.” He tells us who he is. His Word, his revelation of himself. He does. Not circumstances. Pain tells me God doesn’t love me, but Scripture tells me God has demonstrated love in sending Jesus to die in my place. The voice we must listen to is the one that speaks truth—even when we just can’t quite believe in weak moments of pain and doubt. Sometimes all we can pray in the dark is “Lord, I believe—help my unbelief!” And He does. Somehow.

open window unmade bed

The next night, I climbed into bed and tried to find a position for the deep ache in my right hip. “Okay Lord,” I prayed. “It’s just you and me tonight. I need you for every minute of this night.” I prayed in the dark for the Lord to tamp down the fear of the coming pain. And I drifted off for a few hours. Somehow.

The following Sunday, I stood in the church foyer after services talking with a friend. A sweet lady interrupted apologetically. She placed her hand on my lower back and said, “I just want to put my hand here and pray for the Lord’s healing over you. I love you.” Then she hugged me and left. The next day, a friend sent me a Voxer message telling me she felt the Lord compelling her to remind me that Jesus delights in me and to keep my gaze fixed on the One who loves me. The day after that, I received an email from a stranger with A.S. pointing me to God’s faithfulness when life is not what we wanted it to be. The next day, my husband’s close pastor friend texted to see how my health is, to tell us that he is faithfully praying for me.

I thought of my friend’s hand on my back when I stretched an Icy Hot patch across my S.I. joints this morning. I thought of the Voxer message as I sat in the infusion chair getting a hefty dose of nutrients and vitamins. I thought of the kind words in my inbox as I drove home from the clinic. I thought of our friend’s faithful prayers as I stood in my kitchen making a meal for a church family and realized my pain levels were surprisingly low today. I thought of the money that showed up in my bank account to cover my treatment, of the meals that showed up at my door to feed my family when I didn’t have the energy to cook last week, of the freelance work that showed up just in time to cover a medical bill, of the texts, letters, calls, and prayers of saints who have quietly and faithfully exhibited the unfailing love of Christ to me.

I pray a lot of things in the dark. The ritual of waking with nightly pain has morphed into regular midnight prayer sessions. Most nights—every night—I pray for healing, but here lately, I’m also praying to see God’s love in its place. And I see it. When I look, really look—I see his love everywhere. From the pages of my Bible to the prayers of a stranger, I am continually reminded that if God doesn’t heal, he still loves. And maybe I wouldn’t see so many glimpses of his love if I didn’t need to look so hard. The Lord has made a thousand declarations of love to me, not least of which is the fact that I belong to him at all. He saved me. He’s saving me still. I’m already his, but I’m not yet home, and until that day—he will keep me. Somehow.

What we pray in the dark, he often answers in the light. Maybe not in the way we want, but in the way we need.

“Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”
Psalm 30:5b

 

What we pray in the dark, He often answers in the light. Maybe not in the way we want, but in the way we need. Share on X

*For those who have inquired, in the weeks since writing this post, I’ve noticed a slight improvement in my symptoms as I seek treatment. Thank you so much for praying for me.

Photo by Ömürden Cengiz on Unsplash

Sometimes I Need a Sunrise

Every morning this week, I’ve watched the sun rise. Every morning, without fail, the sun persistently pushes down the dark of night, lower and lower, into the horizon until I can’t see anything but light. It happens so slowly that you can’t tell it’s happening at all. Were you to try to decide which moment the dark was darker than the light or the light lighter than the dark, I’m not sure you could do it. One moment you can’t see your hand in front of your face, and the next, the shafts of a rising sun obliterate all the darkness that obstructed your vision. I forget how dark the dark can be until I see a sunrise.

A few weeks ago, I slipped into a pit of dark discouragement. Some things I’d been pleading with the Lord to fix, to change, to renew—well, it all seemed to be a big “no” from God. I don’t know what else to do with my prayer requests. Like Peter and the disciples standing around when a crowd of people had just abandoned Jesus for his hard teaching about his body and his blood, I look at my life, at what I believe about God, at where I’ve staked all my eternity, and I have to say, “Where else can I go? You alone have the words of eternal life.” I will go to my grave holding on to those words. But that doesn’t mean that my faith isn’t bruised by the perpetual thrumming of pain in my spine, by the hollowness of my womb, by the yearning to deal a final blow to my undoing sins of anger and bitterness. I might believe, but sometimes I can’t see. Darkness gets too dark. Sometimes I need a sunrise to help me see.

The trouble with discouragement is that you can set up camp there in complete obscurity and isolation. If you don’t call out for help, you might just stay for a while. We tend to feel that when we’re struggling with faith or doubt or pain or loss that we should hide those weaknesses from others. Circle the wagons, you know? When we’re in a better place mentally or spiritually or physically, we’ll show up to our life. We’ll just live in the dark until we feel like reaching for the light. But the problem is, we forget what light looks like when it’s shadowed by the dark. We need others to get down in the pit of darkness with us and lift our chins to remind us what light even is. While we might be tempted to turn out the light and let the dark tell us what’s true, we must take care. The enemy likes us down in the dark. He whispers and we listen: “You’re too sinful, you’re too weak, you’ll always hurt this much, you’re not as loved as everyone else.”

The only response is to disbelieve our adversary and to let the light break through. When we’re stuck down in the dark nights of the soul, the way forward is still by grace through faith in Jesus.

During my recent bout of deep discouragement, my husband spoke truth to me when my heart and mind felt too worn down to remember what was true. A little bit of light got it. A good friend prayed for truth and hope in Jesus to reign in my heart, and a little bit of light got in. I stood with my congregation and sang songs that hurt coming out of my mouth, listened to sermons that pierced but also healed, held the cup and the bread with a clenched fist and a weak heart. But a little bit of light got in.  My Bible stayed open, and if the words felt faded, dull, and worn, they’re still sharper than any weapon I’ve got. The Word always does its thing, and the light breaks in. I pray with tears and lament one day, with numbness and a cold heart the next. But the Son and the Spirit take every broken utterance and make them right before the Father, so a little bit of light gets in.

Little shafts of light pierce the deepest dark, pushing down discouragement and disbelief into the horizon until the heart is filled with truth and hope and joy. It happens so slowly that you can’t tell it’s happening. Were you to try to decide which moment the dark was darker than the light or the light lighter than the dark, I’m not sure you could do it. One moment you can’t see truth in front of your face, and the next, the shafts of a rising sun obliterate all the darkness that obstructed your vision. I forget how bright the light is until the darkness gets swallowed up by all those tiny, blinding, brilliant shafts of light.

The sun rising over the flat farmland of southern Missouri is quite literally a daily occurrence that divides the night from the day, but there is something so steadying about the certainty of its predictability. Chaos, grief, loss, pain, and death abound in both our hearts and our world, but not one of those things tilts the universe out of our Savior’s hands. He is still holding all things together. Sometimes I need a sunrise to remember that “in him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4-5). It doesn’t take much for the Light of the world to break into the darkness. Sometimes, I just really need a sunrise.

My Bible stayed open, and if the words felt faded, dull, and worn, they’re still sharper than any weapon I’ve got. The Word always does its thing, and the light breaks in. Share on X

 

Sharp Tools, Good Hands

I didn’t have to look at the clock to know what it said, but I looked anyway. Two-thirty-six a.m. I know what that part of the night feels like; it’s not a new phenomenon. I’ve had nightly waking pain for the better part of eleven years.

I creep out of bed, walk in a stooped position to the kitchen where I begin a finely honed process of pain management. I press start on the microwave. The heating pad was placed there before I went to bed, the two minutes already dialed in. In the living room, I position the pillows on the couch in a very specific way that allows me to sit up straight with my legs extended. A neck pillow sits on the back of the couch. While the heating pad warms, I turn on the sound machine. From 2:40 a.m. until about 6 o’clock, I’ll sit straight up on the couch and pray for sleep. In slips and snatches, I’ll grab little pieces of rest, sometimes. Other times, the pain in my spine sings too loudly, burns too hotly, aches too persistently. The stiffness sets in by 4 a.m., and like a morning fog, it takes a few hours to burn off. By 6 a.m., the coffee is brewing, and I’ve given up any pretense of sleep. I swap the heating pad for an ice pack and settle in for some bleary-eyed Bible reading and coffee-sipping, praying that one of those things will make me feel human again. Already, I dread bedtime because I will start the whole process over again. I’d do anything for sleep, but life with a chronic pain disease doesn’t make much room for sleep.

thorny branch

Last fall, I contracted an infection that vaulted my disease into a full-throttle flare I’ve been unable to control. While I tick down days on the calendar until the appointment when I can sit down with my rheumatologist and discuss a new treatment plan, I am learning again to function on only a couple hours of sleep at night. After I was initially diagnosed and found remission, I used to vow I’d never let myself get back to pre-diagnosis pain again—as if I could control something like that. If you were to meet me in person, you’d think I am perfectly healthy. You can’t see my disease yet, though its progression will eventually manifest itself. I won’t die from it, but I will die with it.

The nightly pain and crushing fatigue have made it difficult to think, difficult to write, difficult to pray, difficult not to spiral down into the depths of internal despair. I forget words and lose my train of thought, but worse than that—I have to fight a lot of doubt and mental darkness. The persistence of pain and the loss of sleep slowly chip away at logical thinking, and in the middle of the night I find myself wondering why the Lord won’t remove this excruciatingly painful thorn from my worn down, exhausted flesh. At 2:36 a.m., pain translates to judgment. Fatigue means lack of love. Brain fog and headaches must mean condemnation. I spiral lower and lower as the nights wear down my faith and my body with crushing persistence.

The apostle Paul wrote, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Cor. 12:9). Sometimes I think Paul was crazy for rejoicing in his thorn. It must have been a different kind of thorn, I decide when the heating pad, the pillows, the medication, the praying, and the pleading don’t work. It couldn’t have hurt this much. But, who am I to judge what I do not know? Paul begged for the Lord’s deliverance, and the Lord said no. We don’t beg if it’s not that big of a thorn.

This morning, I tried sitting in a hard-backed chair for relief, looking at the cover of my Bible on the kitchen table for a few moments before opening it. God uses weakness, pain, thorns to perfect His power, to put it on display. He doesn’t always remove the thorn when we ask because He has purpose in its presence. I know this well. It’s a lesson I learn over and over again. If not for the pain burning in my body, would I call on Him this much? If not for the wakefulness, would I say His name each night? Would I be thinking at all about how He loves me in saying no? Would I know His name as a shelter, a wing, a refuge, a place to rest when rest isn’t an earthly reality?

God uses all sorts of things to sanctify us—His Word, prayer, the church, relationships, work, and yes, even pain. He prunes and prunes, lopping off what isn’t needful so that there is room for what is. In the night when I fear pain is a punishment, I remember that He only sanctifies His children. He doesn’t prune what is destined for fire. Pruning is proof of His love for me. But sometimes, I look at the way He prunes me and the way He prunes others, and I wonder why He does what He does.

Chronic illness is a painful pruning. I don’t know why the Lord uses these shears, nor why His tools must be so sharp. But the question can’t be “Why are His tools of sanctification so sharp?” The question must be “Do I trust the hands that hold the tools?” That’s it, really. Do I trust the hands that do the pruning? Do I trust the Lord with what He deems to be my thorn? If He permits it, then it must have purpose. He doesn’t waste anything. I know what the answer is, what it must be.

I don’t know why the tools are so sharp, but I know the shape and contours of the hands that hold them. Years of feeding on His words have taught me that they are good hands, strong hands, careful hands, compassionate hands, saving hands. I also know His hands bear their own scars. One day, I will stand before Him fully healed, but He’ll still have scars. It’s by those scars I have been healed from sin, and it’s by those scars I will be healed from pain. When I see Him face-to-face, this thorn will finally make sense, as will His painful pruning.

His tools may be sharp, but His hands are good.

 

I don’t know why the Lord uses these shears, nor why His tools must be so sharp. Share on X

The Word That Never Fades

Last December, one of our faithful elderly church members passed away. As frail as his health had been prior to his death, his wife of seventy-one years had already been suffering from Alzheimer’s. She was recently moved to a nursing facility that specializes in the type of care she requires. As restrictions have recently lifted in our area, nursing homes have opened for visits once again, and my husband and I have finally been able to visit the precious widow who has supported our ministry and loved our family well for the past sixteen years.

On our first visit, this sweet church member wept when we prayed with her. Though her memories collide with the present and it’s challenging for her to stay rooted in the moment, the habits of faith that she has built her life upon still seem to anchor her with recognition of the Lord’s presence. Wherever her mind may travel, He is ever with her. On our last visit, we took our kids, which definitely seemed to lift her spirits (as it did with all the residents we saw. Please, take your children to nursing homes!). Yet, even the face of a child didn’t affect our sister in Christ like the words of the Lord.

We gathered in her room and sat on her bed while my husband opened his Bible to the passage that was preached at church last Sunday: John 11. He read of Lazarus and Mary and Martha, of Jesus’s God-glorifying delay in going to them while Lazarus was still alive. Our friend listened and nodded attentively as my husband read, but she gasped when he read that powerful sentence: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (John 11:25-26). I looked up to see her eyes closed and tears dripping down her cheeks. When Jesus asks in verse 26, “Do you believe this?” she nodded.

reading Bible

I remember when my grandmother was lost in a world of confusion after many years in the grip of Alzheimer’s. After the first few years, she couldn’t speak or make eye contact. Her suffering was difficult to watch, and yet, there were a couple of things that penetrated the dark isolation of her mind. She always seemed to respond to the televised preaching of Sandy Willson in Memphis every Sunday morning. She couldn’t attend church anymore, but the weekly exposition by Pastor Willson seemed to touch something within her. Though non-verbal, she tried to sing along with the deep contralto voice of the social worker who visited and sat knee-to-knee with my grandmother and sang her favorite hymns to her. Maybe these are isolated events, but there is something about the words of the Lord, whether read or preached or sung, that cut through the confusion of the suffering mind, if even for a moment. I think we forget that saints who suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s still have the Holy Spirit dwelling within them. Not only do they not suffer alone, but the Spirit testifies to their security in Christ (Rom. 8:16). He does not abandon them in their suffering but helps them as Jesus promised he would (John 14:26).

Sometimes I think about the things I fill my mind with. Shows, novels, social media. Those things aren’t inherently sinful, and I’m sure my grandmother and my church member enjoyed their fair share of leisure activities. But I knew both women for a long time, and I watched them. Nothing mattered more to them than Jesus, and their lives reflected that. Both were faithful servants in their churches who served, gave, taught, prayed, and studied. Both gave Scripture a prominent place in their lives, reading it often enough to call it to mind. I think about the way that the words of the Lord were embedded in the hearts and minds of these two women, the way Scripture shaped their daily living. The culmination of days and months and years spent treasuring Christ was producing for them an eternal weight of glory.

I have been wrestling the last several months with the first chapter of Colossians, working it into the crevices and folds of my brain each day. My memory isn’t the best but God’s faithfulness is, and I know that the Lord will use the rehearsals of his words to penetrate my heart and reshape my thought life. I come back over and over to Paul’s prayer for the Colossian saints, where he prays that they would be filled with the knowledge of God and strengthened according to his glorious might for all endurance and patience with joy (see Col. 1:9-11). Faithful Scripture saturation fills our hearts and minds with the knowledge of God and helps us persevere until the end.

Many of us say we know God but knowing him means devoting our lives to his chosen means of revelation—the Bible. There is no other way to know him. The more we know him, the more his words wrap themselves around our hearts. The more we know him, the more glorious the truths about his character. The more we know him, the more we look like him. Even in confusion, he is there with us. When the strong words of Jesus—I am the resurrection and the life—were read in that small nursing home resident’s room, something beautiful and powerful occurred. Recognition. Because in her fragile state of cognizance, she still has the mind of Christ. Our bodies and memories will both eventually fade, but the Word of God never will.

“These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God…Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God…’For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.” 1 Corinthians 2:10, 12, 16

 

Our bodies and memories will both eventually fade, but the Word of God never will. Share on X

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

Sorrow, Joy, and Forty Years

A warm June rain soaks the world outside my window. We’ve had a few of those wild, humid summer storms that send us to the basement listening for the tornado sirens. But not today. Today, it’s just a good, gentle soaking. While I sit at my dining room table tapping away on my laptop, everything in southern Missouri is vibrantly green and full and wet. I have noted the changing of seasons by the trees outside the dining room window. How many years have I sat here thinking and typing, watching the world rotate through its revolutions?

rain on window

I celebrate my fortieth birthday on Sunday, and I don’t quite know how to feel about this milestone. The culture tells me I’m as young as I feel. My heart feels older than my body. Ten years ago, my husband threw a big surprise party to celebrate my thirtieth birthday, and someone snapped a picture of me next to the giant frosted cake. I smiled into the camera with an unlined face and a confident heart. In many ways, I am exactly the same person I was standing next to the cake in the church fellowship hall. In other ways, I barely know the grinning girl in the photo with a birthday crown on her head and a crying toddler on her hip. She had no idea at thirty that the next decade would bend her body with pain, would crush her heart with disappointments, would give her a way to say what she really felt, would pull something strong from all her weaknesses. The toddler in the photo towers over me now at nearly six feet tall. When I turned thirty, our hat was in the ring of international adoption, yet we brought home a son four years later from Kansas and we nearly lost him. In the birthday photo, I’m surrounded by a crowd of church members, many of whom would soon leave our church in a way that crippled our ministry for years to come. In the photo, the toddler on my hip forces me to lean to one side, the small spot of pain in my spine first making its presence known. By my mid-thirties, that tiny flame would grow into an inferno that ruled every waking thought for years.

The last ten years have been hard and bitter and sweet and joyous, and it seems that it’s only in retrospect that you can sweep it all together into one long memory and call it good. Some of the good days didn’t seem good until they were swallowed up in sorrows. The sorrows seemed more sorrowful on the days that burned brightly with laughter. While there were days, months—one long year even—that I would never ever want to repeat, I don’t want to lose the memories of the trials and tribulations any more than I want to forget the recollections of golden days and peaceful nights. It’s when you hold blessing and grief together in one hand that you can see how the Lord has woven your joys with sorrows and sorrows with joy so that you don’t lose sight of the incomparable weight of glory that awaiting you at the end of your days. The beginning of your days, really.

My thirties were marked by both deep suffering and tremendous spiritual growth, and don’t think for one second that that is a coincidence. I am not who I was in the photo because the interweaving of joy and sorrow changed the way I viewed the world, my heart, and God Himself. The decade between then and now broke my heart with grief, my body with pain, my mind with fear. And the Lord quietly bound me up with healing through His Word and His faithful presence. If not for the pain, I wouldn’t have seen Him as He showed Himself to me—a still small voice on a thin, papery account of His revelation. He was more than enough.

Sometimes I look back and I cannot tell the difference between joy and sorrow. Therein lies the blessing of the Spirit’s work of steadfastness in your heart, I suppose. I am confident that there are just some things in the Christian life that can only be learned and revealed in the fires of suffering. Peter wrote of this in his first epistle, comparing our deepened faith to the refining process of gold.

“In [your inheritance] you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious that gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 1:6-7)

We grieve through trials of pain and loss, but through them, our faith is tested and refined. The dross of worldliness, sin, and half-heartedness is melted off through the fires of suffering, and since we know that the resulting faith—strong, deep, patient, steadfast faith—is more precious than pure gold, we can persevere through trials knowing God is at work in our suffering. He is making us more like the Suffering Servant we have devoted our lives to follow. In our physical pain, our griefs and sorrows, and the long stretches of mundane plodding in faithfulness, Jesus is ever near. We know Him more acutely in suffering, so let us not always seek to escape that which God will use to shape our hearts to look like His.

My thirties were hard in the way that storms blow through in the midst of a hot, dry summer, battering and bending the trees with high winds while watering the thirsty ground below. After the storm, there’s new, green growth. My thirties were a gain, not a loss, for Jesus was the fixed point in all of it. I am confident He will be thus in this next decade. Every year is for and from Him. Every month, every week, every day, hour, minute, second. In the blending of my memories, sorrows may have brought me near His side, but joy kept me there.

What more do I need in this life than to know Him more today than I did yesterday?

“Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus, just to take Him at His Word,
just to rest upon His promise, just to know ‘thus saith the Lord.'”

 

We know Christ more acutely in suffering, so let us not always seek to escape that which God will use to shape our hearts to look like His. Share on X

 

 

Photo by Xianyu hao on Unsplash

 

Parenting, Unpictured

I remember what I was wearing the first time I held each of my children.

Not hospital gowns, for my kids didn’t come to me that way. With my oldest, I wore a black blouse with white stitching around the neck and arms. I had a short, angled bob with blonde highlights at the time. I had just applied lipstick when the nurse took my picture holding this new baby entrusted to my care. I’m smiling at the camera, but there are tears standing in my eyes. It had been a long wait. In the second picture, I’m wearing a gray and red striped shirt that tied at the waste. My hair hangs in shoulder-length, brown curls. The baby from the first picture leans over my shoulder to peer at his new brother. He is seven years old, his brother newly born. No one looks at the camera; we all look at the baby.

Like most mothers, I rocked my babies and wondered who they would become. I changed diapers and yawned through midnight feedings, I cleaned up baby food splatters and wrestled with the phenomenon that is the fitted crib sheet. I fix breakfast, pack lunches, and prepare dinners. I read books aloud curled up in a too-small bed with freshly bathed and jammied kids. I bandage skinned knees, sit in carpool lines, attempt to help with math homework, practice Scripture verses, pray, read the Bible aloud. I sit between my kids at church, helping one to sit still and the other to pay attention. I wash their clothes, listen to their stories, get frustrated with disobedience, and apologize for my impatience. In a lot of ways, this is exactly what I thought life would be like when I held them for the first time. I factored in the normalcy and hoped for the best life could possibly be for them. It could only include the best.

When you hold your children for the first time, you probably don’t think about their suffering. Unless you’ve had some kind of diagnosis from the start, you don’t think too much about what life will be like a decade from now. This baby in your arms is perfect. His life should be perfect, too. And you will strive to make it so.

I’m still wedged in the early-middle years of parenting. I could revisit this post ten years from now and probably say it all differently, but today, as I left yet another meeting at school with education professionals and therapists, I pondered again the sharp edge of helplessness that parents feel when their kids struggle. We didn’t picture this day when we held our kids the first time. We pictured potential. Neurosurgeons. Lawyers. Sports heroes. Firemen. Professors. World-changers. The world is their oyster, and there are a millions pearls to be had. These are my kids. They can do anything!

And then, you realize one day that your child struggles with this or that, or something shows up in the medical tests or on the report card. Or their personality isn’t what you counted on. Or they carry the struggles you had as a child and tried to shield them from. Maybe you watch your friends’ children excel in sports or academics or friendships and wonder if your child will ever catch up. Or maybe the best they can be is considerably different than what you envisioned that day of first pictures and unlimited potential.

What then?

I’ve prayed for so much wisdom over the past twelve years of my life. Wisdom to know if the fever was getting too high or if that cut was deep enough for stitches. I’ve lain awake at night and prayed to know how to handle this emotional struggle or that besetting sin, how to answer those hard questions or advise on these hurtful comments. Are we doing enough? Are we doing too much? Do they have what they need to become who they’ll become? My children are all at once the babies I used to hold and the adults I can’t quite picture. When they laugh, I see traces of their wet, infant smiles in faces that time is chiseling down into angles and planes of early manhood. I try to carry their struggles until they’re old enough to pick them up alone. It seems, though, that everything is too heavy for me. I’m not strong enough for this. And, as I learn my way through motherhood, it seems I wasn’t meant to be.

If my kids never struggled, I wonder what my prayer life would be like. I’ve prayed for their safety from day one, but as they’ve grown, so have my prayers. Worries pile up like grains of sand on a seashore; when one is washed away, a thousand take its place. I sift through them with prayer, panning for that peace that passes understanding, for wisdom that doesn’t rise and fall with every cresting wave. I try to rest on the anchor of God’s sovereignty. He has entrusted these children to this family for this time right now. None of this is accidental.

Motherhood pushes me to pray, really. Not to protect my kids from everything but to help them trust God through everything. I can’t shield them from pain or problems, from suffering or disappointments. I can put a band-aid on a skinned knee, but I can’t fix the ache of disappointment. I can pack a healthy lunch, but I can’t answer the hunger for happiness. Though I can offer everything I have in my stockpile of motherhood, I can’t give my kids everything they need. But I know who can.

The low places we walk with our kids are rarely factored in. Just look at our faces in those first photos. We didn’t see it coming. (And if you’re not there yet, you will be.) But here we pray and walk next to our children, teaching them to look to the God who faithfully loves and never changes. The realization that maybe they can’t do everything they set their mind to might be the grounds for learning what to do with adversity. Perhaps who God means for them to be is faithful. Just faithful. Perseverance is learned in adversity, in challenges we didn’t factor into our plans. We learn it as parents, and our children watch us. Our pain and our problems, those are the things God uses to teach us strength of character, humility, dependence upon His constancy. In weakness, we see how strong He is. We can keep pointing to our kids, highlighting the North Star of their potential future accomplishments. Or, we can acknowledge that life is sometimes hard but God is very strong.

Self-sufficiency isn’t the goal of my parenting anymore. But teaching, learning, showing, pointing to God’s sufficiency is. He is enough for our kids. Whatever path He takes them down, however fraught with challenges or lit with joy, He will be enough for them. And in their suffering or trials or disappointments, they may look and see that He is.

God will be enough for our kids. And in their suffering or trials or disappointments, they may look and see that He is. Share on X

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

 

Feel Your Weakness, Feel Your Need

I lay on my left side facing the screen. The sonographer squirted a clear jelly on the wand and rested it near my sternum. Fascinated, I watched images of my heart fill the screen—pumping, beating, opening, closing. This is amazing, I thought, until I felt the familiar flutters and off beats pounding in my chest.

Later, when I was dressed and ready to go, the sonographer said the cardiologist would definitely want to talk to me about that valve problem he saw in my imaging. It’s not serious, but it’s one more thing.

I’d been feeling off for a few weeks until the flutters, pressure, and pain sent me to the ER. All the health history takes a while to explain. How can a disease in my spine impact my heart? It can, though, and after three hours in triage they sent me home with medication and a referral to see a cardiologist for further testing. The autoimmune disease that has wrecked my joints can also inflame the sac around the heart. I don’t know for sure yet, but it may also be the culprit for the valve issue discovered in the sonogram.

In the middle of all the weeks of testing, I was scheduled to speak at an event in my hometown. I sat in the green room before taking the stage to talk to a hundred women about God’s faithfulness in suffering, and I felt my heart do it’s strange knock, knock, pause, flutter before resuming a normal rhythm. My breath came a bit short, my head ached. I prayed for the Lord to still my heart, literally, while I studied my notes. Now? Could the timing be any worse?

My body has often failed me when it matters most. One disease fuses my abdominal organs together and has emptied my womb of any chance at holding life. The other disease lives in my spine and may one day fuse the vertebrae together in a permanent, forward curve. I’ve carried the scourge of chronic inflammation in my eyes, my rib cage, my hands, my spine, my knees, my skin, and now, my heart. It’s called a “whole body” disease. While there are seasons where everything quiets and I feel some respite, I know that around the corner something new can arrive or something old can awaken. Stress, even a good, anticipatory kind, triggers flare-ups. It stands to reason, then, that whenever I’m given an opportunity to talk about how God has sustained me through suffering that the suffering comes sweeping back in. My message must always be a present-progressive one, I guess. If I’m talking to you about God’s presence in our pain, know that I mean it right now, here in this moment, present tense.

silhouette of woman against sunset

When I need to be strong, I feel my every weakness. I feel the pointed edges of disease poking holes in my confidence. For a moment, doubts spin in my head. But then grace seals up every widening crack because something good is happening in the failure of my earthly form. Christ is at work in the pain in my spine, the flutter in my chest, the fog in my brain. For when I feel my every weakness, I also feel my need of Him.

When I feel my every weakness, I also feel my need of Him. Share on X

I have long bowed at the altar of self-sufficiency. Earlier in life, I felt confidence in a long line of accomplishments and talents. I liked that I could bend the approval of others towards my gifts. But poor health, among other things, has smashed my confidence. There is grace in this. The gift of a broken body is that it brings awareness of our insufficiency. It deepens the truth that without Christ we cannot do a blessed thing right. The good news is that He doesn’t require us to come to Him in a blaze of personal glory or a bounty of extraordinary talents. He doesn’t need us to be strong. He doesn’t actually need anything. He graciously includes us in His kingdom work and specializes in doing it through weak, ignorant vessels.

Self-sufficiency is a blind fold. It masks our true need for Jesus. Herein lies the gift of weakness. In the grip of disease, lack, poverty, deferred hopes, waiting, loneliness, and grief, the mask slips down a bit, and we get a glimpse of just how desperate we are. Just how dejected. Just how needy. This, weak friend, is a gift. Because there is a remedy for our desperation. In our weakness shines the great hope of Jesus Christ. When we were dead in our sins, He made us alive. When we think we’re too weak to be of any use to Him, He includes us in His plans anyway.

The One who saved us also sanctifies us, and He doesn’t need us to pretend like we don’t have problems in order to use us for His kingdom. His strength is magnified in our weaknesses. My four-year-old sings to me often, “We are weak, but He is strong.” There is no glory-grabbing in that. It’s all His. It can only be His. And I hear the Lord’s exhortation to Paul in that children’s song: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). The things we think will keep us from being useful are the very things He uses for our good and His glory.

When we know we need Him, we lean all the more on His strength. When we lean more on His strength, He gets the glory for the work that He does in our weakness. And then we can say with Paul, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamites. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9-10). Even operating at 100%, our best efforts are no match for the power of the risen Lord within us. His strength will always be enough.

I don’t feel strong when I sit in a doctor’s office and try to explain the rubick’s cube of my health history. I don’t feel strong when the pain in my spine wakes me up at 2 a.m. I don’t feel strong when the off-rhythm in my chest unsettles me while I’m driving across town or trying to sleep at night. I don’t feel strong when fatigue presses in during a busy work season. I don’t feel strong in the way we often think about strength. But grace abounds in my weaknesses, for when I am weak, I feel my need for Him. When I am weak, I remember that His power rests upon me. When I am weak, I remember that contentment is anchored to Christ, not my body or my gifts or anything that depends upon me, and then—then I am strong.

Let not conscience make you linger,
Nor of fitness fondly dream;
All the fitness He requireth
Is to feel your need of Him.
This He gives you, this He gives you, this He gives you
‘Tis the Spirit’s glimmering beam.[1]

 

 

 

 

[1] Joseph Hart, “Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy.” Lyrics.

Photo by Ahmet Sali on Unsplash

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