A High-Tech, Old-Powered Remedy

Cough, cough… two dry coughs are followed by an intentionally shallow sigh so I don’t launch more of them like Roman Candles.  I’m tired of coughing, and I’m miffed to admit I have so little control over this cold.  At the start, I took the first cold pills I came across in my stash of random meds; then, when that didn’t work well enough to suit me, I resorted to finding my glasses and actually reading the mini-print on the label beyond the section that began with the bold-faced “Directions.” I took more pills, different pills, pills for different symptoms, and then, I took a break from taking pills to avoid a rebound effect that I think I remember some doctor talking about on TV one time.  Cough, cough...’why two times?’ I wonder absentmindedly. I’m not sure about much today, but I am pretty sure that my mind politely absented itself sometime around 3 AM.  Can’t have gone far though.   I’ll probably come across it somewhere around here when I’m picking up used tissues later.  Too tired to look now.

I shuffle to the computer desk and sit down, pressing a few buttons to find the world.  Still there.  Someone “likes” someone else’s post.  Nosey me, I click to see what that might be and I’m led to a Youtube upload of a slightly balding man playing an old hymn on the piano.  He’s alone.  Me too.  So, although the song is one I’ve heard a zillion and a half times, one I’ve sung so many times that I know all 4 verses by heart, I decide to unmute the speaker icon and let it roll.  To tell the truth, I decide to listen, at least partially, because I remember how irritated I was last night when a TV commercial advertising a rock concert struck me as having usurped its title to describe a mere couple of decades of radio oldies.  Calling their concert “Rock of Ages” seemed like a no-brainer affront to God, even if the hymn itself was old as the hills from whence its image came.  I was in a growly, dug-in mood.  Then, here today, in the broad daylight that I’m greeting with squinty eyes, the song itself arrives on my Internet doorstep.  I click in defiance, on principle, to demonstrate, to no one in particular, which side I’m on.  Click, click…

He sings slowly.  In no hurry.  Usually I prefer upbeat renditions, but today I just give up. 

Which, as it turns out, is the perfect way to hear this song.  At the second verse, my heart decides it’s OK to barge in with my raspy voice and make a duet of it.  Naked…helpless…foul.  Perhaps also, arrogant…controlling…wallowing in self-pity? I clear my throat during the interlude and to my surprise, I “soar to worlds unknown” in soprano.  But in the end I pray in a spoken, broken-voice, “let me hide myself in Thee.”  Once again.   

Tired, sick, old Christian that I am at times. 

Turns out that I’m still tucked into that sound, safe place.

So, I’m typing, and coughing, and still typing, and part of me thinks this will sound too hokey, too Jimmy-Fallon-Thank-You-Note-ish, but here goes.  Thank you, George Hunsberger, and thank you, some friend of a friend - unknown to me - for posting, for liking, and simply for being yourselves out there.  You matter to me.  And thank you James Ward, whoever you are, for singing and playing so beautifully. ( http://youtu.be/UznDZGOLTM8 )

It’s all so simply graceful.

You know.  

Pastor Shirley