“Give to the Winds Your Fears”
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Give to the winds your fears, hope, and be undismayed;
Wait for God’s time, so shall the night soon end in joyous day.[/pullquote_center]
I’m so excited to introduce you to this brand-new hymn today! Has there ever been a time when we needed more to be reminded to release our fears? Has there ever been an atmosphere so steeped in dangers and threats, both to our bodies and our spirits? Have you ever heard so many people speak of being afraid, wounded, grieving? There is war and violent turmoil and the stealth war of terror wrapping the globe. There is the huge amount of media-fed fear of Ebola outbreak, and the comparatively overlooked outbreaks of easily preventable disease spread by poverty and uncaring. There are church scandals and schisms of every size and stripe, both reported and swept under the rug. There are private and intimate losses that rock families and tear the hearts from living people. This new hymn speaks a fresh word of peace to these new times.
And yet. This hymn is not so new. It’s, like, 1650’s old. And these times? They’re not so new either. Paul Gerhardt’s Europe had been ripped apart by the Thirty Years’ War, the population reduced by the millions by plague. The church he loved, the one that had nurtured and educated him, was being rent by schism, and he found himself grieving in the no-man’s-land left behind. He lost both a much-beloved infant child and his wife to early death. So you see, this hymn, and the contemporary fears it addresses, are really not so new.
We all fear. We all hurt. We all wait for the dawn. Come, day.
Leigh Anne Armstrong