August 28, 2013

• This morning in the bean patch, it was easy to feel like complaining.  It was muggy, and the flies were biting and leaving blotches of blood on my ankles.  I searched about the leaves and on the vines and the pickins were slim in comparison to other years.  The stink bugs had laid eggs on some of the beans and the wasps and the bumblebees droned about.

  Sometimes when I’m in the bean patch, I find it helps to sing, and often, because I cannot think of what to sing next, I start with the alphabet and try to sing a song for each letter.

  A — All Thing Bright and Beautiful

  B — Be Still and Know 

  C — Come, Ye Disconsolate

  D — Dare to be a Daniel

  E — Every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before

  F — Follow the Path of Jesus

  G — Going Down for the Last Time (That’s how you found me, Lord)

  H — Heaven will surely be worth it all

  I — I Owe the Lord a Morning Song.

  And “I” always gets me.  If there is any song that I remember us singing as a family in family worship, it was this song.  So much so that I remember every word of every verse and am able to sing it (if the tears don’t choke it out, that is).  I think it must have been one of my Daddy’s favorite songs, his strong tenor would swoop and soar over our childish voices and Mama’s clear soprano.  When I look at when it was written, and by whom, I realize that it was one of the “newer songs” of the church in my Daddy’s youth, written by a Mennonite minister, Amos Forrer Herr, one Sunday morning when the snow was too deep for his horse to make it to church.

  It’s a good song for the bean patch on a morning in August when you are running a race against the rain.  It makes the memories brighter, the load lighter, the job seem shorter, and the heart glad.

  The next time you have a job that you don’t feel like doing, try this little exercise — with your own songs, of course.

  It will help.  I promise.  Almost every single thing except maybe those biting flies.  

  You can use insect repellent for that,

  The songs are good for the rest of what ails you.

   

   

  • 11:15 pm
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