Helping the Church Sing, Think, and Worship Well
After the First World War, the Imperial War Graves Commission faced a tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of men lay in the ground in France and Belgium, with nothing to identify them. The Commission determined to give each of them a headstone anyway, asking Rudyard Kipling to write the words that would go on the stones of the men who could not be identified.
Kipling wrote. A Soldier of the Great War. Known unto God.
His men breached the dams in August. Then the water stopped rising. The flat-bottomed boats sat stranded miles out, and the wind was silent for weeks. Inside the walls, people ate leaves and boiled leather while plague moved through the streets, and something close to a third of the city died. When a crowd gathered to demand surrender, the burgomaster stood in front of them and offered them his own body to eat before he would open the gate.
In 1887, a young man named Francis Thompson mailed a packet of poems to a London magazine called Merry England. He wrote them on scraps of paper. For a return address, he gave a post office, because he had no home to give. He was sleeping along the Thames, selling matches and newspapers, and losing a long fight with opium.
One morning the cupboards were bare. Hundreds of children sat at long tables in the building, with empty plates and no breakfast. Müller stood, gave thanks to God for the food the children were about to eat, and waited.
There, a man in chains in a foreign prison, surrounded by enemies, declared that the presence and faithfulness of God reached past the walls and into a future he could not see.
Around 2005, a botanist named Elaine Solowey planted a few of those seeds, each roughly 2,000 years old. One of them sprouted. The researchers named the seedling Methuselah, and it grew into a healthy date palm.
Joy broke into a long season of waiting, and a wedding summoned a worn-out people to look up. The bride left one house and was brought to another, and a country that had forgotten color remembered it for a day.
A room full of people bowing their heads can be worshipping the living God, or worshipping an idea of God that makes no demands.
He later wrote that he would remain in prison “till the moss grew on his eyelids” rather than agree to silence the gospel.
The God of the Bible moves toward weakness. He gives life where human ability has run out.