Leaning on the Everlasting Arms -- Elisha Albright Hoffman and Anthony J. Showalter

How long to do suppose hugging between humans (like what’s in this picture) has been around? Forever, right? And yet we don’t seem to get tired of it. In fact we need it, like medicine or daily bread. Babies are said to be underdeveloped if they don’t get this treatment, in fact. So, when Anthony Showalter received a couple of letters one day in 1887 that reached out in heart-brokenness, he responded, even though the fellows whom he sought to embrace were not within arm’s reach. “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” was what he and his collaborator Elisha Hoffman composed to salve the hurt of not just two broken hearts, but countless others who might hear of their remedy for this condition. There’s not only a mortal quality to this therapy, but also a divine one that carries the ultimate cure.

Showalter was a 29-year old music teacher from Georgia, who happened to be in Alabama, and sought out his 48-year old friend Hoffman in Pennsylvania, with help from inspired words Moses spoke in a wilderness thousands of miles and years from 1887. Two former students had lost their wives in death, and somehow they each knew to whom they could go for solace – their former music teacher, Mr. Showalter. He didn’t disappoint them, offering sympathy in letters, referring to Moses’ words about God’s ‘everlasting arms’ to his people as he prepared to leave them in his own death (Deuteronomy 33:27). But, he didn’t stop there, feeling moved that a hymn worth remembering was hidden inside this episode. So, when he wrote his friend Elisha with the words to the chorus and what motivated them, his cohort responded with three verses. Anthony soon had the music written to match the words Moses, Elisha Hoffman, and he had authored. An amazing thing had happened, even though it took fatal blows to generate the product. Moses’ words came as he thought about his own passing, and they echoed centuries forward as A.J. Showalter confronted the same issue. Did the dual nature of his former students’ loss accentuate the experience for Showalter? Perhaps he felt overwhelmed by his young friends’ despair, an engine that propelled him to Moses’ episode and a people preparing to move on without him. The potion the two 19^th Century men and their forefather Moses prescribe for this death struggle we all face, probably numerous times in an average lifetime, never loses its potency. Their words in “Leaning…” say that it grows stronger, in fact.  

This story tells us something about the nature of us, passed on from a God in whose likeness we’ve been constructed.  That the hymn has survived into the 21^st Century shows the three who gave us the words (Moses, Showalter, and Hoffman) knew what power lay in the words, necessary for humankind to endure its final tragedy. How did Showalter know to go find these biblical words? It must be that he’d discovered he couldn’t escape inevitable death, even if he himself hadn’t yet reached 30 years of age. Instead, embracing is the answer. This includes other people, and Him, too.

Information on the song was also obtained from the books  Amazing Grace – 366 Inspiring Hymn Stories for Daily Devotions, by Kenneth W. Osbeck, 1990, Kregel Publications; The Complete Book of Hymns – Inspiring Stories About 600 Hymns and Praise Songs, by William J. and Ardythe Petersen, 2006, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.; and Then Sings My Soul – 150 of the World’s Greatest Hymn Stories, Robert J. Morgan, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003.

See following site also. http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/l/e/a/leanarms.htm

He Loves Me – Anonymous

Anyone could say this. Could that be why this particular song – “He Loves Me” – has no recognized composer? He was just a believer, one among the countless who wanted to say something about the love of his life. But, he did more than just declare how the Almighty felt about him. He asks lots of questions, as if his was a guarded response to God’s gift initially. After all, could it be credible for anyone to love to the degree that He did?  Was it these questions that leapt off the page for Anthony Showalter, when he picked this one for a worship songbook he published in 1898?

Whether 40-year old Anthony Johnson Showalter may have known the writer of “He Love Me” as the 19^th Century came to a close is unknown, but he knew good music when he saw it. Showalter was himself a musical composer, and had produced many collections of hymns by the time he spotted this love song. His 130 productions spanned more than two decades in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries. It was in Dalton, Georgia where Showalter published the second volume of his Song Land Messenger, which includes “He Loves Me”.  Showalter was known all over the South for his musical enterprising in teaching, composing, and publishing, so he must have had a plethora of contacts who floated ideas, like new songs, his way. Perhaps this mysterious composer was also a Southerner, or maybe it was large number of folks who developed the song’s words, to which Showalter or some other capable musician contributed the tune. Lots of questions were on the mind of this poet, as he or she puzzled over God’s selfless behavior.

Why did He leave home? What compelled Him to reach out to people wary of His true identity? How could He endure the lures of this world? And, most bewildering, why was He apparently bent on a martyr’s cause? The answer: LOVE. There’s a musical I take part in this Easter weekend that sums up His looming, yet providential destiny. He had the secret answer, but He had no desire to keep it hush-hush. He made death turn upon itself, He, the creator of life. That’s what Jesus knew, what He came to do. This universal guiding principle isn’t just another ‘silly love song’, as a well-known secular composer (Paul McCartney) has written. It’s not a cute, fuzzy, bunny rabbit you cuddle this Easter. No, as Philip Yancey has written, the Christ’s Easter is blood-stained, but with overpowering hope. “…then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality. Hope then flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life.”  Maybe that’s what the anonymous composer discovered -- he couldn’t resist the draw of the love God implemented. Love is powerful, even by human standards. But, try God’s love-standard…it might knock you over, but it also lifts you to a place you’ll never go otherwise.  

http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/s/h/o/showalter_aj.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_Showalter

http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/cgi-bin/vanga.cgi?query=id%3Awtf028&_cc=1&Welcome

 

See also Philip Yancey’s “The Jesus I Never Knew” Zondervan Publishing House, 1995, p. 220.