For Spring

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolv’d and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;
A press of hurried notes that run
So fleet they scarce are more than one,
Yet changingly the trills repeat
And linger ringing while they fleet,
Sweet to the quick o’ the ear, and dear
To her beyond the handmaid ear,
Who sits beside our inner springs,
Too often dry for this he brings,
Which seems the very jet of earth
At sight of sun, her music’s mirth,
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardor, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day ....  [The Lark Ascending]

Not my will but Thine

Via The Wittenberg Door, some good thoughts about prayer from the In Christ Jesus site:

1. Prayer, at its most basic level, is an expression of our dependence upon God.
2. Our purpose in prayer is to glorify God by seeing him actively accomplish his will here on earth. God, not us, must be the center focus of all our prayers and it is his will and not our own that we must pursue.
3. Submission and solitude are essential ingredients in Jesus’ prayer life and should be in ours.
4. Our intention in prayer should be that we recognize how God is working in and through circumstances, rather than merely change them.
5. Thankfulness for God’s movement in the lives of our brothers and sisters allows us the opportunity to see God’s work in others and helps us avoid self-absorption.
6. Prayer for knowing God better, gaining special insight into our eternal hope, and for power to live for God’s glory should govern all other requests.
7. When we pray, we should emphasize a growing love for one another, pure and blameless living, and all that accommodates our maturity in Christ.
8. A depth of insight into the limitless dimensions of Christ’s love for us can only be gained by prayer.
9. God is more interested in us than in what we want and he occasionally denies our requests so that his glory and our good will be optimal.

God’s Providence, Our Prayers | ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ (in Christ Jesus)

Complicating the usual narrative

Paul Rahe notes an anniversary. One hundred years ago today segregation came to the federal government — advocated by the "reality-based" progressives of that day. Rahe:

President Woodrow Wilson

One hundred years ago today, Woodrow Wilson brought Jim Crow to the North. He had been inaugurated on March 4, 1913. At a cabinet meeting on April 11, his postmaster general, Albert S. Burleson, suggested that the new administration segregate the railway mail service; and treasury secretary William G. McAdoo, who would soon become Wilson’s son-in-law, chimed in to signal his support. Wilson followed their lead. ....

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ordinary Americans may generally have been in the grips of ethnic prejudice of one sort or another. The Progressives of that time were not, however, ordinary men, and they knew it. Like their successors today, they dominated America’s universities. With some justification, they thought of themselves as an intellectual elite; and, with rare exceptions, they enthusiastically embraced eugenics and racial theory. That the inchoate racial prejudices of their contemporaries were grounded in fact they took to be a truth taught by science; and, being devotees of rational administration to the exclusion of all other concerns, they insisted that public policy conform to the dictates of the new racial science.

Wilson, our first professorial president, was a case in point. He was the very model of a modern Progressive, and he was recognized as such. He prided himself on having pioneered the new science of rational administration, and he shared the conviction, dominant among his brethren, that African-Americans were racially inferior to whites. With the dictates of Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement in mind, in 1907, he campaigned in Indiana for the compulsory sterilization of criminals and the mentally retarded; and in 1911, while governor of New Jersey, he proudly signed into law just such a bill.

Prior to the segregation of the civil service in 1913, appointments had been made solely on merit as indicated by the candidate’s performance on the civil-service examination. Thereafter, racial discrimination became the norm. Photographs came to be required at the time of application, and African-Americans knew they would not be hired. The existing work force was segregated. Many African-Americans were dismissed. In the postal service, others were transferred to the dead-letter office, where they had no contact with the general public. Those who continued to work in municipal post offices labored behind screens — out of sight and out of mind. When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Independent Political League objected to the new policy, Wilson — a Presbyterian elder who was nothing if not high-minded — vigorously defended it, arguing that segregation was in the interest of African-Americans. For 35 years, segregation in the civil service would be public policy. It was only after Adolf Hitler gave eugenics and “scientific racism” a bad name that segregation came to seem objectionable. .... [more]

Progressive Racism - National Review Online

Letters to Malcolm

Via Trevin Wax:

Kindle Deal of the Day: Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer by C. S. Lewis. $2.99.

In this collection of letters from C.S. Lewis to a close friend, Malcolm, we see an intimate side of Lewis as he considers all aspects of prayer and how this singular ritual impacts the lives and souls of the faithful. With depth, wit, and intelligence, as well as his sincere sense of a continued spiritual journey, Lewis brings us closer to understanding the role of prayer in our lives and the ways in which we might better imagine our relationship with God.

Actually, I think, Malcolm was an invention and the "letters" a device to say what Lewis wanted to say about prayer. Good book.

Chronological snobbery

From the G.K. Chesterton Facebook page:

This is the only period in all human history when people are proud of being modern. For though today is always today and the moment is always modern, we are the only men in all history who fall back upon bragging about the mere fact that today is not yesterday. I fear that some one in the future will explain that we had precious little else to brag about.

~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, 3/12/32.

For readers and researchers

The Digital Public Library of America launches on April 18.

Margaret Thatcher, RIP

“Being democratic is not enough, a majority cannot turn what is wrong into right. In order to be considered truly free, countries must also have a deep love of liberty and an abiding respect for the rule of law.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013)

Probably no conclusion should be drawn...

Hitler, who was a teetotaler, had very low opinion of Winston Churchill: in an opinion he repeated often he said Sir Winston was an "undisciplined swine who is drunk eight hours out of every twenty-four."

Today, in response to Margaret Thatcher's death, an Argentine newspaper opined that one of the reasons for her ill health was that the victor of the Falklands War "had suffered the ravages of too many gin and tonics,"

During the American Civil War, when someone complained to him that Grant was a drunk, Lincoln responded "Find out what Grant drinks and send a barrel of it to each of my other generals!"

On a 300th anniversary

Dr. Ron Davis has provided more information about Joseph Stennett, the first Baptist hymnwriter — and a seventh-day Sabbatarian — in a Facebook entry:

Joseph Stennett (1663-1713), the first significant Baptist hymnwriter, died 300 year ago. Dr. Isaac Watt's Hymns and Scriptural Songs in Three Books (1707) contained Joseph Stennett hymns. Dr. John Rippon's A Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors (1787) contained both Joseph Stennett and Samuel Stennett hymns. Samuel Stennett (1728-1795), Joseph Stennett's grandson, was a contemporary of Rippon in London, and sometimes they served as pulpit supply at one another's churches. The Rippon hymnal went through numerous editions and was the hymnal most used by Baptists in early America. The Stennett hymns were frequently sung into the late 19th century....

Edward Stennett (Joseph Stennett's father), Joseph Stennett, and Samuel Stennett, all served as Seventh Day Baptist pastors, and all were also writers. ....

.... My oldest psalter book is from 1763, my oldest Stennett book from 1732. The latter is volume one of four volumes of his written works published posthumously as The Works of the late Reverend and Learned Mr. Joseph Stennett. I would love to own volume four which contains fifty of his hymns for Communion. Thirty-seven of these Communion hymns were originally published in the 17th century (in 1697).

Dr. Davis provides some examples of Joseph Stennett's hymns including these verses:

Glory to God on high be giv'n,
Who shews this grace to sinful men:
Let saints on earth, and hosts of heav'n,
In concert join their loud amen.
Whenever One Sinner Turns To God, stanza 7

Awake my mind: awake my song;
Awake my heart; awake my tongue;
Join with the grateful praising throng;
In offerings to our common Lord.

Wherever fleeting winds can blow,
Wherever swelling waves can flow,
Where beast can rove, or plants can grow,
All creatures praise his name with one accord.
An Hymn

Joseph Stennett at Wikipedia

Joseph Stennett: First Baptist Hymnwriter, the 300 Year Anniversary of His Death (Part II)

Worship

A Lutheran friend writes

"...[W]e now have our second service every week with a praise band singing what I think are actually fairly dreary songs. I won’t go into all of my complaints, but I now am going to the first service.

.... I find the contemporary services boring, and just Christian-lite. The texts are sometimes called 7/11 — seven words heard eleven times. It also ignores the church eternal by just using contemporary songs and texts, ignoring the vast history of church music and texts that go back millennia. Our benediction used to be the Aaronic Blessing (“The Lord bless you and keep you, …”) but I haven’t heard that for a long time. ...."

He linked to this rather encouraging brief article:

There is a fascinating trend in evangelical circles — a rediscovery of liturgy. ....

A leader in this is Aaron Niequist, a worship leader at Willow Creek Church in South Barrington, Ill., one of the best-known evangelical megachurches. While serving as worship pastor of Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., he became restless and bored with the typical four rock songs and a sermon pattern that had come to dominate evangelical/contemporary worship.

Niequist began to explore adding other elements to worship: multiple Scripture readings; reworkings of classic hymns; call and response songs. He said they were making it up as they went but soon discovered that Christians have been doing these “new” things in worship for centuries. So he began a journey to understand and present liturgy for 21st century worshipers.

A result is “A New Liturgy”, four worship settings that draw on his musical skills and instrumentation of the 21st century and are rooted in his continued study of Christian liturgical traditions.... [more]

I haven't listened to the four linked liturgies yet but I admire the intention.

The Lutheran | ‘A New Liturgy’: This column lifts up trends in worship beyond regular “Lutheran” circles

How large should a congregation be?

An early Baptist on the most important criterion for the size of a church:

“A church ought not to consist of such a multitude as cannot have particular knowledge one of another,” Thomas Helwys, founder of the first Baptist church in England — a congregation that some scholars estimate numbered about 10 members — wrote in the 1600s.

“The members of every church or congregation ought to know one another, so that they may perform all the duties of love one towards another, both to soul and body,” Helwys wrote. “And especially the elders ought to know the whole flock, whereof the Holy Ghost hath made them overseers.” .... [more]

Related: Small churches

Small is big for Millennials

"April is the cruellest month..."

Micah Mattix on the first line of Eliot's The Waste Land:

...Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month” is not so much about his conflicted response to spring (rooted in some forgotten childhood trauma) or about creating a linguistic puzzle to help us develop our skills of attention but about hope.

What makes April cruel in the poem (among other things) is that the hope of new life that spring evokes is, at least for Eliot at the time, always temporal. Unfulfilled hope is the worst sort of pain, and the speaker of the poem initially claims that it is preferable to live in winter, covered in “forgetful snow.” Yet the rest of the poem is largely an act of remembering, as lines, characters, and scenes from the Bible, The Divine Comedy, Metamorphoses, Les Fleurs du mal, Augustine, Spenser, and Shakespeare are trotted out in an effort to temporarily recapture something of what Eliot considered the West’s vibrant (Christian) past.

So we discover, if hope is always temporal, it is also inescapable. As sure as April returns every year, we cannot cease to hope. There is something in us that pushes us to hope in some final consummation, some final life in which there is no winter, no death. Thus, hope in an eternal spring is a fact of the human mind, and this fact either points to nothing, which makes us the most miserable of all the animals; or, as Eliot would later believe, it is a fact that corresponds to a spiritual reality, no less real for having no exact material equivalent. .... [more]

Great Lines: “April is the cruellest month” | First Things

The Reverend Ames

Friends keep telling me I should read this book and for some perverse reason I keep procrastinating [I did buy it]. Philip Ryken on Marilynne Robinson's Gilead:

.... The Reverend Ames is honest about the challenges of ministry, familiar to any pastor. He complains about church meetings ("just a few people came, and absolutely nothing was accomplished"). He confesses how hard it is to love his sheep ("After a while I did begin to wonder if I liked the church better with no people in it"). ....

.... The same people who suddenly change the subject when they see the minister coming, Ames says, will "come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things"—the dread, the guilt, and the loneliness that lie under the surface of life.

In each pastoral encounter, Ames has sought to discern what the Lord is asking of him "in this moment, in this situation." Even if he has to deal with someone who is difficult, that person is "an emissary sent from the Lord," who affords him "the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me."

Over the course of a lifetime in ministry, addressing a wide range of spiritual needs, the Reverend Ames has learned that trying to prove the existence of God is an ineffective strategy for dealing with spiritual doubt. "Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense," he believes. In fact, "the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it" because "there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things."

He has also learned how to answer the questions that people have thought about the torment of hell, which he believes the Bible characterizes primarily as separation from God: "If you want to inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don't hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul." .... [more]

The Challenges Every Pastor Faces – The Gospel Coalition Blog

Introvert

I long thought of myself as painfully shy and socially inept. Some of my most humiliating memories are about reacting inappropriately in unanticipated — and thus unplanned for — encounters and circumstances. If my self-diagnosis had included the possibility that I am an introvert I might have been more comfortable with myself — or not. In any event I understand my behavior a lot better since becoming more familiar with  the category. A friend posted this on Facebook and it's good:

Related: "I hate small talk" and "The world is run by extraverts"

"If the Son sets you free..."

A consideration of "Hunger Games and Dystopia" begins with two earlier dystopias — ones I read in high school [does that still happen?] — representing very different conceptions of "freedom." Is freedom, properly understood, simply the freedom to choose? Andrew Wilson:

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, as has often been pointed out, imagined two very different dystopias. In 1984, written just after the Second World War, Orwell depicts the forces that held people captive as fundamentally external: coercion, espionage, laws, constraints, threats, lies, the state. By contrast, Huxley’s Brave New World, published just after the Wall Street crash had turned the excess of the twenties into the Great Depression of the thirties, portrays a future in which people are enslaved to forces within themselves: desire, inanity, hedonism, egotism, fatuity. For all the similarities between the two books, it is this difference that is the most striking.

In the modern West, people generally think of slavery, captivity, and the need for liberation in Orwell’s sense, rather than Huxley’s. Our vision of freedom is primarily socio-political, with the greatest threat to human flourishing being the other, whether the Nazi, the slave-owner, or the autocrat. Oppression comes through pain, not pleasure; the essence of liberty is to be without external constraint. Humans are free if they are able to choose, to will their own future, to decide for themselves what they will do with their lives. By this definition, modern Westerners are all free, with the exception of prisoners and the incapacitated.

Many of the ancients saw things more like Huxley. In what could be called a more religious or philosophical vision of liberty, the greatest threat to human flourishing is the lack of wisdom, phronesis, or virtue. Whereas moderns understand freedom in terms of unconstrained individual choices, many ancients regarded the forces underlying individual choices—passions and desires which might in turn be foolish, selfish, or carnal, much like those depicted in Brave New World—as something from which people needed to be freed.  ....

The essence of eleutheria, in the vision of writers from Aristotle to St. Paul, was being free to become what one was originally designed to be, rather than simply being free to make decisions (decisions which, of course, might stunt one’s progress towards ultimate fulfillment). Thus humans could be enslaved, not just to the other, but to the self. One needs redemption from the flesh as much as from the powers. Under such a vision of liberty, modern Westerners might not be as free as we would like to think.

.... The fact that the state is best equipped to promote political freedom, which I take for granted, does not mean that it is the only sort of freedom there is.

The Judeo-Christian tradition holds both types of liberation—from the other and from the self—together, with its repeated emphasis on the concept of redemption. Israel is set free from slavery in Egypt through the Exodus, but immediately requires rescuing from her carnality and idolatrous desires in the wilderness. The prophet Isaiah describes the political redemption from Babylon that Judah will experience (chapters 41-48), and then looks forward to the spiritual redemption from sin that will follow (chapters 49-55). Jesus himself articulates his mission in Isaianic terms, promising both freedom for captives and forgiveness for sinners. .... [more]

Hunger Games and Dystopia | First Things

"A Christian who confidently denies the resurrection is an oxymoron"

Stephen Rankin, University Chaplain at SMU, on "Christian" resurrection deniers:

.... This time every year we get a slew of magazine articles, TV “documentaries” and (now) blog posts and Twitter comments about the believability of Jesus’ resurrection.

Lots of good possibilities for serious give-and-take between believers and non-believers.  I love talking to honest skeptics.

But there’s one group I admit I’ve grown weary of: Christian resurrection-deniers.  Not resurrection deniers in general, but those who claim to follow Jesus, who blithely assert that thinking people simply cannot believe the hocus pocus about Jesus rising bodily from the dead.  If resurrection means anything, so this line of thinking goes, it can only have metaphorical/symbolic significance.

Let me narrow my charge a little more.  A Christian struggling intellectually with belief in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, who honestly wants to know the truth and pursues it with transparent intensity and a willingness to learn; for this kind of Christian I have utmost respect.  After all, one of the major characteristics of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection is how Jesus’ own followers doubted!  But the easy, breezy, smooth-talking, read-the-latest-John Spong-Marcus Borg-Dominic Crossan-and-now-we-know-what-really-happened  Christian, tries my patience mightily. A Christian who confidently denies the resurrection is an oxymoron.

I repeat: it is not argumentation, doubt or critique of the resurrection that bothers me.  It is the facile dismissal – by Christians! – of a central belief of our faith. .... [more]

Ignoring the Resurrection Deniers - Rankin File

How should the Narnia Chronicles be read?

Should the Narnia books be read in the order they were written or according to their place in the chronology of Narnia? Opinions differ and dubious claims have been made that Lewis himself preferred the latter. Alister McGrath, in my opinion, argues persuasively for the former:

.... The most significant difficulty concerns The Magician's Nephew, the last in the series to be written, which describes the early history of Narnia. To read this work first completely destroys the literary integrity of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which emphasises the mysteriousness of Aslan. It introduces him slowly and carefully, building up a sense of expectation that is clearly based on the assumption that the readers know nothing of the name, identity, or significance of this magnificent creature. In his role as narrator within The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis declares, "None of the children knew who Asian was any more than you do." But anyone who has read The Magician's Nephew already knows a lot about Asian. The gradual disclosure of the mysteries of Narnia—one of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe's most impressive literary features—is spoiled and subverted by a prior reading of The Magician's Nephew.

Equally important, the complex symbolic structure of the Chronicles of Narnia is best appreciated through a later reading of The Magician' Nephew. This is most helpful when it is placed (following the order of publication) as the sixth of the seven volumes, with The Last Battle as the conclusion. .... (Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet, 2013.)

Surprised By Joy

At Amazon.com you can buy the Kindle edition of C.S, Lewis's spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, for $2.99:

"A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere... God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous."

This book is not an autobiography. It is not a confession. It is, however, certainly one of the most beautiful and insightful accounts of a person coming to faith. Here, C.S. Lewis takes us from his childhood in Belfast through the loss of his mother, to boarding school and a youthful atheism in England, to the trenches of World War I, and then to Oxford, where he studied, read, and, ultimately, reasoned his way back to God. It is perhaps this aspect of Surprised by Joy that we—believers and nonbelievers—find most compelling and meaningful; Lewis was searching for joy, for an elusive and momentary sensation of glorious yearning, but he found it, and spiritual life, through the use of reason.

In this highly personal, thoughtful, intelligent memoir, Lewis guides us toward joy and toward the surprise that awaits anyone who seeks a life beyond the expected. .... Christianity Today [as quoted at Amazon]

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life: C. S. Lewis: Amazon.com: Kindle Store

"But not the same mistakes"

I am still less than halfway through Alister McGrath's C.S. Lewis - A Life partly because he keeps reminding me of, and sending me back to, something Lewis wrote. Today to an essay, "On the Reading of Old Books":

.... Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook — even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united — united with each other and against earlier and later ages — by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century — the blindness about which posterity will ask, 'But how could they have thought that?'— lies where we have never suspected it.... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them. .... "On the Reading of Old Books"

C.S. Lewis, "On the Reading of Old Books," God in the Dock, 1970.

Depression

Re-posted

Kathryn Greene-McCreight, who suffers from depression, in Christianity Today, "Light When All is Dark":

Lord Jesus Christ, you are for me medicine when I am sick;
you are my strength when I need help;
you are life itself when I fear death;
you are the way when I long for heaven;
you are light when all is dark;
you are my food when I need nourishment.
—Ambrose of Milan (340-397)

....In his Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis says that suffering is uniquely difficult for the Christian, for the one who believes in a good God. If there were no good God to factor into the equation, suffering would still be painful, but ultimately meaningless, because random. For the Christian, who believes in the crucified and risen Messiah, suffering is always meaningful. It is meaningful because of the one in whose suffering we participate, Jesus. This is neither to say, of course, that suffering will be pleasant, nor that it should be sought. Rather, in the personal suffering of the Christian, one finds a correlate in Christ's suffering, which gathers up our tears and calms our sorrows and points us toward his resurrection.

In the midst of a major mental illness, we are often unable to sense the presence of God at all. Sometimes all we can feel is the complete absence of God, utter abandonment by God, the sheer ridiculousness of the very notion of a loving and merciful God. This cuts to the very heart of the Christian and challenges everything we believe about the world and ourselves. ....

Depression is not just sadness or sorrow. Depression is not just negative thinking. Depression is not just being "down." .... When I am depressed, every thought, every breath, every conscious moment hurts. ....

And yet the Christian faith has a word of real hope, especially for those who suffer mentally. Hope is found in the risen Christ. Suffering is not eliminated by his resurrection, but transformed by it. Christ's resurrection kills even the power of death, and promises that God will wipe away every tear on that final day. But we still have tears in the present. We still die. In God's future, however, death itself will die. ....

The hope of the Resurrection is not just optimism, but keeps the Christian facing ever toward the future, not merely dwelling in the present. .... All Creation will be redeemed from pain and woe. In my bouts with mental illness, this understanding of Christian hope gives comfort and encouragement, even if no relief from symptoms. Sorrowing and sighing will be no more. Tears will be wiped away. Even fractious brains will be restored.

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of your glory and dominion, world without end. —John Donne (1572-1631)

 William Cowper, who also suffered from depression, wrote Sometimes a Light Surprises in 1779:

Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings;
It is the Lord, who rises with healing in His wings:
When comforts are declining, He grants the soul again
A season of clear shining, to cheer it after rain.

In holy contemplation we sweetly then pursue
The theme of God’s salvation, and find it ever new.
Set free from present sorrow, we cheerfully can say,
Let the unknown tomorrow bring with it what it may.

It can bring with it nothing but He will bear us through;
Who gives the lilies clothing will clothe His people, too;
Beneath the spreading heavens, no creature but is fed;
And He Who feeds the ravens will give His children bread.

Though vine nor fig tree neither their wonted fruit should bear,
Though all the field should wither, nor flocks nor herds be there;
Yet God the same abiding, His praise shall tune my voice,
For while in Him confiding, I cannot but rejoice.

Light When All Is Dark | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction, Sometimes a Light Surprises