Lift Every Voice

Last night, I prayed to tell God how I felt about what needed to happen with the elections — believing that God lets us mostly run our affairs ourselves — and went to bed believing the Dems would at least take the House but not the Senate.

Sometimes, it’s good to be wrong!

So today, I started wondering: did God intervene on America’s behalf — for this is a victory for America, the one I know — or did things just happen? Then at choir practice tonight, this was the first song we worked on for Sunday:

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring,
ring with the harmonies of liberty,
let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies,
let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us —
facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
felt in the days when hope unborn had died,
yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears as been watered,
we have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered —
out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou Who has brought us thus far on the way,
Thou Who has by that might led us into the light,
keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
let our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee —
shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
true to our God, true to our native land.

The eerie thing is, this song was written in 1921. And it fits this day perfectly. All of it. Even the warning, now that our nation has started to find its way back, to stay on the right path.