Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

By Myrtle Virginia Thompson

Are you singing today? With the virus, the ugliness of politics, the national and international news, who can sing? Besides all that we have personal problems. How can we handle them and still sing? To ask if I am singing is a foolish question! We don’t seem to get out from under the canopy of one depressing thing before the wind blows in another. We run for the escape hatch. It may be a pill or a drink, even sleep, anything to calm our fears and remove the depressed feelings, but when we wake up, we find yesterday did not go away.

Stressful days have always been a part of life. We handled those times by solving our problems or putting them on hold. Today is different. We can’t see what is up ahead. The sun is not shining as bright as it was. We talk among ourselves. We hear conflicting news. We want someone to decide the truth for us, even if we don’t believe it. Any joy bred in us by all we have in America is quickly taken away when there is an emergency of any kind. It puts on the brakes for singing any kind of a song.

Many years ago, my neighbor in a village in northern Pakistan sent her little girl to my gate asking me to come. A few days earlier, I had sat with the family after their baby daughter had died. Death comes in two packages, loss in this life and eternal loss.

An all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent God created this world, but there is an adversary, and we allow him to rule our lives. God is able to forgive our sins and give us new life if we ask Him. Jesus can live in us and put a song in our hearts. He can bring joy in sadness. I know because He did that for me more than 75 years ago. Just ask Him to take over your life and make it new.

After hearing the news one morning, my heart was “hurting me.” I turned on the radio station to 99.7 FM and heard these words: “My heart can sing when I pause to remember a heartache here is but a stepping stone along a trail that’s winding always upward, this present world is not my final home. But until then, my heart will go on singing, until then with joy I’ll travel on, until the day my eyes beholds the Savior, until the day He calls me home.” I began to raise my voice in praise. I went to the Psalms and found hope. You can do that. Get a Bible and read in the Book of John what God says about life in this world, then pray, asking God’s forgiveness. He can and will put a song in our hearts when we see life from His perspective.

Myrtle V. Thompson, 93, is a retired educator, missionary and writer. Contact her at mvtgrt@gmail.com.