Bring Christ Your Broken Life -- T.O.Chisholm

Before he retired, he’d been selling insurance, but he was also writing about assurance in 1935. He’d sold many insurance policies to people while living out the last four decades of his life in New Jersey, yet the assurance guarantee that Thomas Obediah Chisholm grasped in ‘Bring Christ Your Broken Life” was not written on a piece of paper like the other policies he’d sold. Nevertheless, the people for whom his poetry was intended probably needed to be both insured and assured, if his words were in fact meant for people who’d had a lot of struggles. Thomas himself was not immune to difficulties, so what he penned was not a sterile, impersonal prescription, but one that he likely had consumed, perhaps multiple times. Thomas was an intermediary, recommending to those who were willing to look, a protection plan from the Divine One who was higher than himself – the CEO, if you want to think of Him that way. The Creator-Eternal-One (CEO) still offers it today.

Thomas Chisholm had a circuitous route toward the 69^th year in which he lived and wrote about what to do with ‘…Your Broken Life’. He spent roughly the first 40 years in Kentucky, where he was born, educated, and worked – as an editor, and after his ordination, briefly as a minister in 1903. When his health forced a change, Thomas and his family moved to Indiana for a brief time. It was there that Chisholm took up insurance sales as his professional calling, which he continued when the Chisholms moved to New Jersey in 1916. So, by 1935, Thomas had been in a variety of situations, not all of which he could have evaluated positively. His own health, a war (World War I) that he lived through, and an economic depression in the 1930s that was worse than anyone had seen before must have made Thomas’ pitch for insurance and assurance a credible message to people he encountered. Many a ‘broken life’ and countless who’d lived through some ‘empty, wasted years’ (v.1) may have crossed paths with Thomas, who could have shared his own experiences with them in empathy. How many ‘care(s)’, ‘haunting fears’, and ‘dread’ (v.2) did Thomas listen to before he wrote this poem, offering hearers some hope? At 69 years old, was Thomas being autobiographical when he wrote about ‘weariness’ and ‘blinding tears’ (v.3), or was he thinking of someone to whom he was close? Whatever drove Thomas to write ‘Bring Christ…’, he didn’t choose to think exclusively about the ‘dark’ and ‘drear’ (v.4), but juxtaposed those with a solution…or, rather, the Solver.

The contrast between the first two words of the hymn’s title, ‘Bring Christ’, and its last three words, ‘Your Broken Life’, make Chisholm’s message especially notable. Words like ‘anew’, ‘whole’, ‘restore’ (v.1); ‘relieve’ and ‘lift’ (v.2); ‘love’, ‘wonderful’, ‘power’, and ‘great’ (v.3) permeate Thomas’ poetry, despite the references to life’s valleys. He reminds his audience that bringing Christ can overturn the broken life. It’s not just an exercise in complaining to Him, but rather accessing His compassionate spirit and catching at least a glimpse of His rest. One can presume that Thomas felt that way again and again, since he lived well into his 90s (93 years old) and wrote hundreds of poems that became hymns. As life mounted, with all of its attendant issues, Chisholm must have pulled out ‘Bring Christ…’ many times to clear his vision of the finish line. And, he must have imagined beyond that too, to the ‘morning break (ing)’ (v.4). Can you see the morning sun yet?  

See biography on composer here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/c/h/i/chisholm_to.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Chisholm_(song_writer)