Abide with me, Lord

 Ezekiel 37  

 was, by God’s providence, part of my devotional reading today.   Tuesday, December 10, 2024.  It has the cornerstone providence of being a tremendously enigmatic passage for many reasons and I simply can’t say how many times I have referred to it, without knowing its address or context, too specifically and when I have read it I had no time to unpack it with any real profit to my soul. 

I love imagining the prophetic power of raising dead bones to life.  The relationship between the drybones arising and the life of the tribe of Judah combining with Ephraim in the renewal and restoration, struck me deeply this morning.   Somewhat, because of the turbulence and unrest in that region at present and somewhat because of the birthday of my dear Grandma being today and the remembrance of the things she suffered in cancer and early death has been a grief in my soul all these 41 years.  Couldn’t you have let her live just a couple more days to see her grandchild wed?  I ask the Lord, with no answer.  I know that “Whate'er’ My God Ordains Is Right!”  I know that God knows all and sees the beginning from the end, but it has been a haunting question, nevertheless.   Her death drove me to devour the hymnal, nearly in its entirety.

That was the last hymn that we sang together.  God didn’t let me sing to her, in her suffering to exalt her as the “wind beneath my wings”.   We were a sentimental family and her life ending was an enormous blow.  God had said a declarative NO.  She wasn’t there, at the wedding in the flesh.  I couldn’t sing to her in private after that moment and my last encounter with her was her frown of disdain that someone could consider themselves a real Christian who had no knowledge of the words of any hymn to comfort the dying soul.  I had indeed disappointed her in multiple ways.   And I would rise to the occasion and never let that be said of me again, with many friends who coached and assisted me swimming that deep channel of my soul, through a lifetime.

As friends, we sat in the pew together and sang in congregational singing and talked about the blessing of that hymn in our life situations.  As we traversed the winding paths of young married life and mothering, with numerous trials of health and finance, etc. we found comfort in the hymns and committing them to memory.  

One dear friend had an infirmity that was affecting her sight and she was finding comfort that she would be able to sing the hymns, just the same, if it were God’s good pleasure to render her blind.   That was just one example of the faith that we enjoyed and the unity of the Spirit, to feel God knitting our hearts through a common love of the historic hymns of the Church.

Today’s devotions showed me my place in those dry bones being raised to life by the breath of God being blown into them, to glorify God in this short sojourn.

Thank you God, for your entering into my grief walk and growing my soul’s resolve to be strengthened to know You in the vicissitudes. Amen!