featured hymn for this Sunday
Tom Walsh
FEATURED HYMN FOR THIS SUNDAY
No. 100 When Morning Gilds the Skies
Usually when poetic words are translated from one language to another, some of the poetry is lost. In this case, though, the words translated from the original German are also beautiful in English.
The anonymous German author points out that we shouldn’t limit our praise to God to church services. The glory of God’s creation is all around us every day — when we first wake up, when we pray, when we go to work, at night when we look up at the stars — and this awareness is cause for exuberant, uninhibited celebration.
While we don’t know the specific writer of this hymn, we know it was first printed in a hymnal in Würzburg in 1828. That means the author was probably familiar with the lovely Franconia region of Germany, the home of fairy-tale castles, deep green forests, and beautiful mountains. Here is a typical Franconian landscape:
We have nothing quite like this on Getwell Road in Memphis. But it doesn’t matter what our immediate surroundings look like. Christ is here, with us. That makes wherever we are a beautiful place, and that’s why Christ deserves our full-throated praise.
Tom
    
 www.fordharrison.com Thomas J. Walsh, Jr.
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