Hymns

Tonight I was with some friends from church, and near the end of the evening the woman leading the discussion passed around some hymn books and asked us all to pick our favourite. Now, a lot of people my age don't like hymns much. I get it - they're old fashioned and they generally involve either an organ or a piano. Rarely a guitar, no drums. Never drums. But I, being somewhat old fashioned myself (I can admit it. Sometimes I feel like an 80 year old in a 29 year old body), kind of love them, and because most people nowadays don't like them so much, we tend not to sing them at church very often. So I was rather excited about the prospect of singing a bunch of random hymns on a Thursday night.

However, as a Lutheran/Alliance/Baptist church girl in a Methodist church environment, this became a difficult task, because apparently (although I didn't realize this until I moved here) there are different songs for different denominations (as though we needed yet another way of dividing people...). So I grew more and more disappointed as I flipped through the index at the back looking for the hymns that immediately sprang to mind from growing up in a hymn-y kind of church and finding none. Until I spotted it - Be Thou My Vision. It's my fall back hymn. The one that springs to mind at the most random times and always makes me feel better about whatever is going on. It is tied only by It Is Well With My Soul, which nearly always makes me cry.

Anyway, we went round the group and sang everyone's hymns (with a piano, thankfully...otherwise that could have been dreadful), and then we got to mine. And the only thing I could think about the whole time we were singing was my grandfather, and how he would have been smiling if he'd been there.

And so I just wanted to post this, in his honour. Because while I'm pretty sure all of my friends are aware that I'm a Christian and I go to church, it's not something I talk about very often. I'm not ashamed or embarrassed to talk about it, if it comes up in conversation I'm open and happy to talk about it, but I've never liked the 'In Your Face' Christianity that seems to come so easily to some. I'd rather just be, and let others be as well. But I can't sing hymns without thinking of my grandfather, and I can't think of my grandfather without thinking of true Christianity and how much, in my mind, he exemplified that. He would have been happy seeing me tonight, and even though he'll never read this, I just wanted to say, out loud (or on the internet...whatever.) that I had a lot of fun singing a bunch of random hymns on a Thursday night. And I wish he could have been there.