The Hymn That Followed Me Home

Years ago, I searched high and low for Sen-Sen. My father always carried a little pack in the pocket of his suit coat, and as a boy I loved them. Eventually they disappeared from store shelves. I bought boxes of them whenever I found them, knowing they wouldn't last forever. 

Today they're gone, but the memories remain.

Looking back, I realize I was searching for more than candy. I was trying to reconnect with a time and a person I loved.

Looking at an old family photo triggered a memory of something else I have been searching for. A hymn. Actually, a recording of that hymn. A hymn I heard for the first time as a child.  Isn’t it funny how our senses work. We see a picture, we remember a particular taste, and then a sound.

For me, that progression led me to a precious memory. That old black and white photo got me thinking about what we might have been doing back then. My siblings and I are clearly dressed in our Sunday best. It’s 8:15, I’m guessing in the morning, because at that age we’d have been in bed if it was evening. There must have been some important occasion that my parents wanted to memorialize.

Once a month, we traveled from Greenville, Pennsylvania, to Buffalo, New York, where Apostle John W. Fendt conducted District Services at Kleinhans Music Hall. Congregations from across the district gathered there, and the combined district choir filled that magnificent hall with music unlike anything I'd ever heard.

Before the service began, the choir would sing. There were no microphones, no praise band, no stage lighting – just dozens of well-trained voices, accompanied by a magnificent pipe organ, filling Kleinhans Music Hall with harmonies that seemed to come from every direction.

One of the songs the choir sang was composed particularly for this kind of choir. In 1922, Carrie B. Adams composed a choral anthem based on Psalm 125. I found and purchased a copy of The Choir Herald where it first appeared.

Each time I hear the words of that Psalm, I am taken back to hearing the New Apostolic Church Buffalo District Choir sing, They That Trust In The Lord. Particularly the section of the song where the choir stops and a trio of voices begins.

The full choir stops; a trio steps out from the choir and up to a single microphone. The organ plays and two women and a man begin: 

“I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord.” 

The voices blend as one. 

The harmony flawless. 

The timing impeccable. 

When the full choir resumes, they sing powerfully, 

“Let the people praise thee, praise thee oh God!”

I can still remember how the final chord resounded in that hall and in my soul. 

I can still hear it now. 

I searched for years for a recording of that song. 

I eventually found a recording on YouTube.

The video was grainy, the sound was poor, and the choir... well, let's just say they weren't the NAC Buffalo District Choir. I listened anyway. Not because it matched my memory, but because it reminded me that some things are too deeply woven into our lives to be recaptured by a recording.

As a younger man, I searched for an obsolete breath mint. 

Years later, I searched for an old hymn.

One could never be found again. 

The other, I discovered, had never really been lost. The words of Psalm 125 are still with me, and so is the trust in God they planted in the heart of a little boy. 

Following Truth Wherever He Leads

A "Wink of Providence"

I have been working on another book, One Tin Soldier. While working on a genealogy, I discovered so many mysteries about my ancestors, that it led to me creating a work of historical fiction. As I wrote this post, I received one of those unexpected ‘winks of Providence.’ I learned that Kleinhans Music Hall had been designed by a pair of Finnish architects. Eliel and Eero Saarinen. Father and son. As someone who would eventually come to appreciate his own Finnish heritage, that discovery made this memory even sweeter.