Singing hymns throughout my life has reminded me of biblical truths and helped them sink deep. It has lifted my heart in worship to God. It has connected me to a long line of brothers and sisters who wrote and sang these same theological truths together centuries before me. 

In the Presbyterian church I grew up in, we sang from the red Trinity hymnal, although occasionally things would get a little rowdy and we would break out the light blue Living Praise. Our music team consisted of a pianist and an octogenarian flautist, who could often be heard between lines because he wasn’t quite on the same tempo, if even the same song. When a hymn number was called, I’d flick to the page to investigate how many verses there were. Five verses or more and my spirits would sink only to rise again if the song leader isolated verses 1, 3 and 5. My sisters and I learned to take a line each and harmonise. We loved the minor keys (“O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus”), we smirked at the floral numbers (“I trace the rainbow through the rain”^[1]), we sighed through the dirges (“deathbeds are coming, coming for you and for me”^[2]).

When our dad died at fifty, we sang the harmonies we had learned to one of his favourites, “When Peace, Like a River”, at his funeral held in the church he had faithfully pastored. Friends came over afterwards and we sat around the kitchen table singing the hymns he loved with tears in our eyes.

While in my early childhood I may have found hymns long and sometimes strange (“foul I to the fountain fly”^[3]), I now have a profound appreciation for them. Singing them has been a blessing to me throughout my life. I am sometimes so moved by them that I’m unable to continue singing, even when the tune is soppy and the musical execution weak. It is more than mere nostalgia; this can’t just be attributed to the ageing process (like a new appreciation for fruit cake and elasticated pants). It is a deeper understanding of and gratitude for the gospel story we sing about—the story of our redemption, of the beauty and goodness of our Creator and his world, of the kindness and faithfulness of our Saviour. It is singing with a greater sense of what it means to age and decay, to struggle with sin, to feel weary and to long for a better world.

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