I Love the Lord – Tommy Wheeler

I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice 

and my supplications.

(Psalm 116:1)

He wrote something as he neared mid-life in 1969 that he probably felt he needed to say. Tommy Wheeler indicates he often listened to his insides, jotting down musical phrases “as they might come to him”, anticipating using them in his songs. It wasn’t surprising that he declared “I Love the Lord” that year, because he already had been engaged in loving Him for some time. But, one might ask ‘why?’ What prompted him to jot down these words then? Besides loving Him for the past, one other focal point is evident in the thoughts he recorded that year, and Wheeler’s own memories of that time also help us answer these simple questions. 

When he composed that day in 1969, 38-year old Tommy Wheeler had been involved with music for decades, and would continue this path long after his mid-life musical statement. In a way, 1969 and “I Love the Lord” might be described as a hinge-point for other events in his life too, a looking back behind what he’d experienced, as well as looking forward to where he was headed. His cousin, Max Wheeler, remembers Tommy was at a “serene point” that year, after enduring the death of someone he loved years earlier – a crucible for faith growth, huh? Early in his life, Tommy was blessed to grow up in a musical family, under the tutelage of his father who was a minister and musical director. Through high school, Tommy sang and wrote music in many choral groups. This continued through college, and he also obtained some practical teaching experience as a young man. Later, he began writing more music, including much of it for the Stamps-Baxter company while he remained engaged in singing and working with local churches. So, one might say the Lord and music had been cooked into his blood. He was hooked, apparently, on serving God through music. In fact by 1969, Wheeler says he thought of Psalm 116 and how that ancient songwriter’s prose could be woven into his own verses, echoing back another biblical love passage – John 3:16. Wheeler has maintained his path after this 1969 hinge-point, writing or co-writing at least a dozen more songs through the early 21^st Century that are published in many contemporary hymnals today. But, “I Love the Lord”, which Wheeler first published in his own hymnal Gospel Gems, is perhaps the most well-known, for a good reason – its message sums up succinctly why any believer feels the way he or she does. 

The door was beginning to open wider for Wheeler as the 1960s concluded and the 1970s dawned, as it would for anyone reaching mid-life. He’d experienced much that had blessed him, including a family -- three children, and after his first wife died, a second marriage -- and his cousin Max with whom he shared the musical gift of composition. His childhood, youth, and young adult years now behind him, he wrote of his eternal years in his love song. ‘He has been so good to me’, Wheeler reminisces in the chorus, one reason to devote yourself to the Holy One. But, he goes further in all three verses, setting his gaze ahead, to the period beyond earth’s time. These emotions resonate with most humans who consider their lives closely, so it’s no mystery why “I Love the Lord” is sung in other languages besides English, including Russian and Portuguese. Glancing back, yes, but looking forward too, and saying something that transcends any language. I plan on talking to Tommy more, if not here, then up there in the ‘Great Ahead’…maybe I should learn some Russian or Portuguese before I get there, whaddya think?

Biographical information on the composer obtained from the book “Our Garden of Song”, edited by Gene C. Finley, Howard Publishing Company, 1980.

Also, many thanks to Tommy Wheeler for sharing his personal reflections on the song with this SongScoops blogger in December 2012!  

Also see following sites for information on the song: http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/hymnoftheday/message/1342  

http://www.taylorpublications.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=111_112_123_129

Give to the Winds Your Fears -- Paul Gerhardt

What do you call a guy who’s 40-something, unemployed, and alone? A professional and relational failure? Maybe he sensed what others might be saying, because Paul Gerhardt’s words in “Give to the Winds Your Fears” suggest he had an acute familiarity with the therapy for anxiety in the face of a postponed life. He learned during his education to use hymns to teach and minister to believers…so what was he trying to teach and admonish believers in this song? Was Gerhardt suggesting that we merely cast off anxious thoughts as if they are but vapors, easily transported away by the wind? Would doing so make me stride more confidently, as the trees bend and a breeze captures my problems (like the fellow in the picture ‘Wind’, a 14th Century masterpiece by an unknown painter)? It does seem Gerhardt wanted me to think of my troubles as trivial, compared to the Almighty’s hand. ‘Hope springs eternal’ his hymn words suggest. He needed this hope, not just in his 40’s, but closer to the end of his life when his wife died, he had the comfort of only one of five surviving children, and he again struggled to secure consistent employment.

What fears had touched Gerhardt that caused him to minister to himself with this hymn at the time it was written? He had endured the Thirty Years War (in what is today Germany), a trial that initially derailed his vocational life’s beginning in the mid-17th Century. And, he did not marry until 47 years old, and only after obtaining his first position. He must’ve wondered if life would ever start, or if he’d just be in neutral interminably. After all, even by 21st Century standards, 40-something is kinda past halfway for most of us. A biography of Gerhardt’s life tells us that he composed the song during a time when he was most prolific as a hymnwriter, in the 1650s when he was a pastor at Mittenwalde (near Berlin). The year 1651 marked his first posting in ministry, so one might think he was still feeling challenged and anxious, wanting to impress his employer early on in ministry in 1653 when the hymn was written. That’s how I might have felt. He’d been waiting for an appointment for some time (nine years), since his graduation from the University of Wittenberg in 1642. Was his sense of angst amplified – ‘Lord, don’t let me mess this up after I’ve waited for so long!’? If it was, he had discovered how to respond, throwing his troubles in the Lord’s direction, at least according to the words he wrote.

What happened in Gerhardt’s ‘in between’ time, from 1642-1651, is enlightening. He didn’t mope or vegetate because his occupational wheels were spinning. His future and his legacy as one of the great German hymnists really began then. As a tutor in Berlin (while he waited for a real job, you might say), his poetry and hymn-writing captured the attention of someone important. Johann Crueger (someone with one of those real jobs) was a musician and professional worshipper at a church there. A lifelong musical collaboration had begun. And, while tutoring in a family, Gerhardt met his future wife Anna Maria. It seems Gerhardt was not just writing clichés in his hymn about fears and winds. To others he might have appeared to be stuck, but he made valuable use of this episode. Casting off doubts must have freed him for creativity, even while in an unemployed state. Freedom unleashes the believer for His purposes. So, is that why I’m given down-time for a season, maybe even a decade? Before I wish for something more exciting or profitable to come along, I think I’ll take a longer look at what might be under the surface where I’m at. Maybe this is where He wants me, for now.

All nine original verses to the song are at this link: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/g/i/v/giv2winds.htm

Biographic information on the composer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gerhardthttp://www.hymnary.org/person/Gerhardt_P

God Will Make a Way – Don Moen

Mission Impossible – remember this? A match lights, a fire sparks (see the picture), and the musical entertainment begins, building with energy to a climax. These cloak-n-dagger agents capture my imagination, probably because their story has more adventure than mine. They treat danger with a cocky air of confidence. ‘…your mission, should you decide to accept it…’ is really wasted on me, because I know ‘Jim’ always accepts the assignment. The impossible mission crew never found a challenge they couldn’t overcome with careful team coordination, technology, and guile. The make-believe never allows that heroes might be defeated, perhaps by the completely unexpected, perhaps a death of one of the team.

Real life is different, in which an impossible situation might make me feel more depressed than excited. Don Moen’s song “God Will Make a Way” sprang from this kind of episode, a tragedy in his family. See if this song’s story sounds familiar, and if its light-in-the-darkness message might help.

 

 

You can read Don Moen’s own words for this song story at: http://www.donmoen.com/Blog.aspx?iid=26017

If you don’t have the link, Moen’s story briefly goes like this. In 1990, his sister’s family lost their oldest son in a car accident, as they were travelling between Texas and Colorado. Moen was unable to be with them in the aftermath, due to a previously scheduled recording session, but in his grief for them, he found solace by writing the song’s words on an airplane trip the following day. Isaiah’s words (Isaiah 43:19) comforted him, so he rephrased them for the song’s lyrics. His sister’s family met the tragedy with those and other words in the same book (43:4), which helped them understand their son’s seemingly senseless death might have a higher purpose. Friends of the family’s son came to accept God, because of the promise of heaven, and of seeing him again. The family’s own lives were fed as they involved themselves in their local church in a deeper way. Fruit comes about in ways we don’t expect, Moen’s sister remembers. 

 

 

Have you lost someone close? How are you dealing with it – does life seem unfair, maybe even impossible to comprehend, in death’s wake? There’s but one way to manage life, when death intrudes. It’s not pie-in-the-sky to hope in God and to prepare for a home with Him. I believe. If you don’t, what have you got to lose if you change your mind today? That’s what Don Moen and the prophet Isaiah have to say. There’s a way He’s made, though I cannot sometimes fathom it. Impossible, you say? What was impossible in Isaiah’s day is commonplace today – ah, technology. So, what impossibles will become possible in 3000 A.D.? In 4000 A.D.? The Beyond? Let’s go find out!

The Lord’s My Shepherd – King David, and Francis Rous

Was David enjoying a bucolic evening in the park, watching a sunset maybe, when he wrote the 23rd psalm? Most of the verses make one think it must have been a peaceful episode. Green pastures, a banquet table, God’s comfort, and a place in His home, all spelled out for the worshipper in this psalm-song “The Lord’s My Shepherd”. Sounds pretty inviting, doesn’t it?

One verse about a shadowy, dangerous area tells us that there was trouble brewing - - even death. But even there, the Lord Shepherd is the relief and safety valve. But, it was probably David’s experience that sparked the way this song is typically used today, a time when trouble was evident, and God was needed. David was running for his life, in mortal danger. Commentators on Psalm 23 say that he wrote it while in the wilderness of Judea, after his son Absalom seized the kingdom. The verses in 2 Samuel (15:14, 30; and 16:13) give us a glimpse of what it’s like on the run. David was tired, desperate, and feeling depressed. The way the 23rd psalm is used today, one might think that David penned it for use at a funeral -- maybe his own that he saw on the near horizon? But in the desert where we think he wrote this, it seems as if David wasn’t ready to cash it all in. The other verses Samuel records show that David was worried, sure, but also practical and plucky, with a plan and loyal followers around him to execute his counterattack. The psalm tells us David’s plan also included some internal strategy, a divine one. God. David drew on the power he knew his intimate Friend promised, a reassurance that maybe even his earthly comrades could not fathom completely. David, the man after God’s heart, shows a fidelity to the Lord, his Shepherd, in this praise. David had been in lots of scrapes in his life, so he was used to feeling God’s protection even when his surroundings called for pessimism. That’s a feeling I wish I could put in a bottle, to use when I need it most.

The “Lord’s My Shepherd”, though written by the composer-king some 3,000 years ago, has been sung as we know it today only in the last 350 years, since 1650. Francis Rous put together the Scottish Psalter for the church in Britain in the 17th Century, an effort that he felt would make all 150 Psalms, as sung by worshippers, more true to the actual Bible text. Consequently, “The Lord’s My Shepherd” allows us to echo David’s words with precision, but the song also engenders feelings, engaging the other side of me – I think with my mind, but I also sense with my spirit and emotions. The song Rous has constructed for us is that feeling of reassurance in a bottle that I can open and consume when I feel most troubled. That’s what I need at a loved one’s funeral. The song’s history now tells me that it’s more than a dirge, though. It’s for the hopeful, too, the forward-looking. No longer do I sigh and feel an unmet longing for the camaraderie that David and God shared. The words and music of the song King David and Francis Rous penned for me are a balm for all kinds of hurt. I might feel like I’m running in the Judean wilderness, but there is a way through it when my Shepherd is near.

One source for information about the song story “The Complete Book of Hymns – Inspiring Stories About 600 Hymns and Praise Songs”, by William J. and Ardythe Petersen, 2006. Also see the book “Psalms – Folk Songs of Faith", by Ray C. Stedman (copyright 2006 by Elaine Stedman), edited by James D. Denney, Discovery House Publishers, PO Box 3566, Grand Rapids, MI 49501.

The Steadfast Love of the Lord – Jeremiah, and Amy Bessire

See if you can guess what the following cities have in common: St. Petersburg (alternately named Leningrad), Berlin, Warsaw, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Jerusalem. Others could probably be added to that list, especially ones you might be intimately familiar with if you were alive and living in them in Europe or Japan in the 1939-1945 period. War, and utter misery. That’s the common theme, and for those of us who watch the History Channel (some call it the War Channel), this probably wasn’t too hard to guess.

Jerusalem had an eyewitness 2,600 years ago, and he wrote some words that we sing today. Yet, these words don’t sound a lot like someone witnessing horror…in fact, they sound like words of hope and glad tidings. What was the prophet Jeremiah thinking when he wrote the words ‘The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases…’? As he watched the shockwave reverberate in Jerusalem in 586 B.C., Jeremiah found the words to describe the misery in the book of Lamentations, but amidst them he also wrote the words in chapter three (verses 22-24, Revised Standard Version) that we sing cheerfully. It’s a measure of his faith, that the prophet was able to summon these words while observing an abject nightmare. It’s like stumbling upon an oasis in the middle of a vast desert. Unexpected is too tame a word to describe this phenomenon. One would think the composer must have lost his mind, and indeed many spectators through history probably did think prophets were a bit unbalanced – doomsday predictors bent on disturbing the calm, usually. In this case, Jeremiah is doing the opposite, glimpsing the world through rose-colored glasses while all around is utter despair. How’s he do it?

Today, Jeremiah’s unavailable for interview (maybe I’ll see him in heaven?), but maybe there’s some contemporary insights from other wars that can instruct us. I watched with fascination the movie ‘The Pianist’ a few years ago, a true story of how a Polish classical pianist – a Jew – survived in Warsaw in World War II (see picture of city above). He scratched, he clawed to live in 1944-45. One of the last scenes during the war shows him performing for an audience of one, a compassionate Nazi officer who lets him live, and even gives him his winter coat and some food. It’s as if the tide has turned at that moment, when the bottom has been reached, and one human being helps another because he recognizes beauty - the Jew’s piano playing - amid the ruin. Maybe that’s Jeremiah’s secret, that he was captivated by something beautiful, despite the devastation all around him. That’s God. He’s the beauty I can see, the oasis I encounter when there’s nothing else left to sustain me. In May 2008, someone asked the music-writer of “The Steadfast Love of the Lord”, Amy Bessire, to comment on her contribution to this song. Her humble response sounds strangely similar…‘it was all God’. (She was visiting the Four Lakes Church of Christ in Madison, Wisconsin at the time). He’s the oasis, He’s beauty, and He’s music, all metaphors that Jeremiah’s and Amy’s song calls to mind as I sing about His steadfast love.

 The following website contains a comment by the composer who put the prophet Jeremiah’s words to music: http://www.fourlakescoc.org/052908/971web.pdf

Nobody Fills My Heart Like Jesus – Dennis Jernigan

Dennis Jernigan is a living example of a fresh start. He willingly lives, composes, sings, and retells his story for literally thousands and even millions of people. If you haven’t heard his testimony, find one of the websites or a book listed at the end of this entry…they tell it much better than I can write about it here. Look at one of his songs, “Nobody Fills My Heart Like Jesus”, with me for a few minutes, and his life experience and how he has reacted to God’s influence jumps, and even dances right off the music score.
He cannot help celebrating God’s mercy and grace. It’s a message that we can take to others whom our culture misleads, to people trapped in lifestyles that our holy and compassionate God can help them escape. Do you know someone, maybe even several people, who need that, people who feel hopeless? Read just a little of Jernigan’s story here, and pass it along.

Dennis Jernigan came out of a life of homosexuality in 1981 when he graduated from Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU), a graduation in his life in more than one way. Although raised as a churchgoer , and schooled by his grandmother to play the piano – a skill which he honed at the church – Jernigan says he had became unbalanced in trying to please everyone, including his own father. He felt rejected by his father, which Jernigan says was the root of his gay lifestyle, even though his father’s (and his mother’s also) actions were not unlike most other parents of the time. Jernigan’s escape from homosexuality began shortly after his OBU graduation, when he went to a concert by the group Second Chapter of Acts. Jernigan was attracted to the group’s message, which he says was more genuine than what he had seen in other Christian entertainers. The group’s message was that God is real, and that He can lift burdens, even those we haven’t shared with another soul. Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised Jernigan – after all, he was a musician - but the music’s words articulated something that he wanted deeply - - God’s love and hope. Other events turned Jernigan’s life around, in fact 180 degrees around (see the websites or books below), so that today Dennis and Melinda (his wife) have been married for 26 years and have nine children.

Dennis Jernigan could have believed our culture’s lie, that homosexuality is OK, that God made him that way. Instead, Jernigan is now one of the most vivid examples of God’s power to change a distorted life into a fruitful, exuberant existence. “Nobody Fills My Heart Like Jesus”, written in 1991, was one of Jernigan’s first songs in a recording career that was launched the same year with his first two albums. The song’s first few words ‘..from the start…’ hint that Jernigan was still celebrating his emergence into a new life. Although the precise origin of the song is not known, its words underscore his feelings of redemption about which he writes and speaks freely. His book Giant Killers echoes what we sing in the chorus-refrain, when he writes ‘Relationship with God fills our hearts and precludes relationship with any evil…’ (p. 134). It’s a very personal statement Jernigan makes in the song’s 2nd verse, which he also expresses in Giant Killers, proclaiming that God loves us even when we’re wrong, and that we can cry out to him, calling upon him and asking to hear what he says about us (p. 111).

 Other Jernigan songs communicate the message about his life reversal, and now celebration, too, so there may be other stories are out there to discover. Looking back, it might seem that even while Dennis Jernigan was in bondage, the Lord was preparing him to spread a message. That’s hope for even the hopeless, a place where Dennis Jernigan saw himself once.


Information on Dennis Jernigan obtained from the following: websites: http://www.dennisjernigan.com/

http://www.okbu.edu/news/2006-10-27/dennis-jernigan-speaks-at-obu-beyond-the-hill-chapel

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


books: Giant Killers: Crushing Strongholds , Securing Freedom in Your Life, by Dennis Jernigan. WaterBrook Press, 2005. The Complete Book of Hymns: Inspiring Stories About 600 Hymns and Praise Songs, by William J. and Ardythe Petersen, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2006.

I Can Only Imagine -- Bart Millard

Your eyes will see the king in his beauty and view a land that stretches afar (Isaiah 33:17) Most of my dreams frustrate me. Only a few times have I ever remembered more than a few hazy images of what a few seconds earlier had been quite vivid and real. Most times I’m more likely to just roll over and return to making zzzz’s. Sound familiar? If I can believe what doctors say (and what I read on Wikipedia) about dreaming, then I feel still more cheated by my own mind’s trickery. According to the experts, an average normal human being dreams two hours every night, so over a normal lifespan I will spend six years dreaming. About what?! I cannot even remember most of the details of these episodes, yet I seem to need this bizarre activity to be healthy – rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is necessary for one’s well being, they say. Is our Creator trying to tell us something about our own minds when they are let loose, when our own thoughts can create images our logical consciousness will not permit? Bart Millard, lead singer with MercyMe and writer of the hit song “I Can Only Imagine” might be described as a dreamer, for he began considering his own imagination many years ago, and his thoughts stuck with him until he finally composed what had so struck him several years earlier. You can read about Bart’s story behind this song by linking to it here http://www.christianitytoday.com/tc/2003/002/14.16.html, or keep reading below.


 Bart lost his father to cancer in 1991, and he relates that he turned that loss into a time devoted to thinking about what his dad was experiencing on the other side of life’s journey. The phrase “I can only imagine” captured his thoughts, so that he wrote it everywhere, reminding himself of his own destiny and also easing the pain of his earthly loss. It was not until 1999, however, that Bart and his friends in MercyMe recorded the song with that same phrase. Bart says the song was written in ten minutes after he found the words he had recorded in a notebook many years before. Bart deflects the admirers who wonder how he was able to write a hit song so rapidly “….it had been on my heart for almost ten years”, he says. “I ask Him (God) questions. I have faith that Christ is real”, Millard shares. It’s clear that MercyMe’s lead singer’s imagination is not something he ignores as a hazy picture, a subconscious mind-trick at 3:00 AM.

What do you think of when you dream about paradise, about heaven? Pearly gates? Streets of gold, or a yellow-brick road such as the path to Emerald City in Dorothy’s journey through Oz? That’s what I tend to wonder about…it almost seems similar to some of the images in Revelation. Bart Millard wonders in the song what it will be like to be in God’s presence, to walk with Him, to actually see Him. I think that, like the song says, I won’t even be able to stand or say anything for a while, if heaven and the Lord are as brilliant as I imagine. A River of Life is there, I’m told, but I still cannot really grasp that people I now see only in my mind or with pictures are there. Dad, a grandpa I never met (and who’s last words I’m told were ‘what a life’), and friends in the last few years…Bill, Sarah, Bob. They’re there. And I wonder if I’ve discovered why God lets, or perhaps makes, me dream. Is it His way of subliminally telling me my hazy thoughts, though dim, are gonna become real, someday? That I should trust my imagination, and let it run wild, to rejoice in what awaits? I’m counting on it, aren’t you?