Just Be Hush

Let the record show: I don't think that gospel music has gone too far. And there are plenty of contemporary Praise & Worship songs that I like. And I have no quarrel with Christian hip-hop. But I cut my spiritual eye teeth on hymns, the old traditional, multi-verse, theology-packed statements of faith with rhyming stanzas and one chord per note melodies. And today, these hymns remain a vital component of my spiritual diet.

There are three types of hymns: hymns I like, hymns I don't like, and hymns that make me cry. The other morning, I sat down to the piano with troubled heart and the hymnal decided to open to a category three selection.

It's called "Be Still, My Soul." And as I played and sang it, and as the water works started, I felt Jesus speaking to me. Perhaps He'll speak to you.

In the first verse, the amazing statement is made: "The Lord is on your side." Now, for anybody, this is an incredible thought. But for a recovering addict, one who has spent time in the pit of addiction hell, and daily depends on God to maintain sobriety and sanity, this is astonishing! God could be standing in the opposite corner of the room, hand on hip, impatiently tapping His foot, with an expression on His face that says: "I'm just waiting for you to mess up again so that I can…" Instead, He's the ultimate top friend. He's more excited about my victories and progress in healing than I am. And more ready to forgive my failures than I am, too. Paul said this in Romans 8: "If God be for us, who can be against us?" The one Being Who has every right to put us down, judge us, abandon us, vilify us, and expose our underwear – this righteous, holy God is busy working all things together for our good, working out "plans to prosper us and not to harm us, plans to give us hope and a future." God is on your side!

But it wouldn't do much good for this God to be in our corner if He couldn't do much. As I sang through the song, I saw that the rest of the first verse, and the second as well, spoke of His ability to act on my behalf. "Leave to Thy God to order and provide…Thy God doth undertake to guide the future as He hath the past….The waves and wind still know His voice…" No problem that I can experience (external or internal), no situation or struggle is so great that He doesn't have it completely under control. "Your hope, your confidence, let nothing shake"! He's saying: "Bil, I got this. I'm all over this." Not even the deeply grooved ruts of my addictive thinking, the seemingly unfixable character defects I know about and don't know about   not even these are beyond His ability to save. The genie in Aladdin said it like this: "You ain't never had a friend like me!"

In many hymns, the final verse talks about our heavenly eternal destiny. I've often thought of these verses as "skippable." They don't do much for me here and now. But this day, as I saw the phrase "the hour is hast'ning on when we will be forever with the Lord," it hit me. This thing I call life, these stresses and distresses, trials and "troublations," drama and trauma ¬– it's really temporary. We act like it's all there is, but the truth is it's just a rehearsal dinner. The immeasurable majority of my existence will be free from all this, will be in eternity with my Lord. This is just the preamble to the introduction.

My ancestors put it this way: "Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world!" We will spend endless joyous days free from "disappointment, grief and pain," from fear of making mistakes and the consequences of mistakes made, from temptation, from horniness (or whatever your addiction torments you with), from anxiety, from regret, from doubt, from confusion, from self-hatred. "Sorrows forgot, love's purest joys restored." And knowing this, maybe I can hang in there just a little bit longer.

Each verse of this hymn begins: "Be still my soul…" That phrase reminds me of something my middle son used to say when he wore a toddler's clothes. See, my boy was a master of verbal efficiency and one of his trademark phrases was: "Just be hush!" Brothers, sisters, when life has more variables than an algebra book and more changes than the IRS tax code, when things can't get worse and they do anyways, when it feels like you have to look up to see the floor, when you ask yourself, "Why can't I be anybody else but me?"…

…just be hush! "The Lord is on your side."