Reflection Masthead
Issue 117 - Sing Your Name - November 2014

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You are Mine

"I will call your name, embracing all your pain;
Stand up, now, 
walk and live"

Let the beauty of David Haas' song touch your heart in this video:
You Are Mine - David Haas
You Are Mine - David Haas


  

Past Issues

1-Inaugural

2-Creating Sacred Space

3-Leaving Footprints

4-Ordinary

5-Ordered Life

76-Vanier Visit

87-Wondrous Fear, Holy Awe

91-Crater Lake

95-Habits  

100-Iceland

101-On Reflections 

102-Morning Moments

104-Into Self Into God

107-First Home

108-NBA Championship

109-Not Nice

110-On Freedom 

111-Electronic Dependency

112 Robin Williams 

113-Matisse 

114-Simple Acts 

115-The Seen Edge 

116-Kentucky Epiphany

Link to all past issues  

 

  

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To Sing Your Name
   In the poetry group I belong to, a prompt is given each month. This month's prompt was "Sing your name -- and see what comes." So far two poems have come, including this one:

Sing my name, you ask me?

Oh, I would, I truly would, but...

when I try to sing my name,

the sounds are hollow,

off-key, faltering.

Like so much in my life,

the chords are unresolved,

the melody halting,

the tone flat.

 

Sing my name, you ask me?

"Yes!" The answer comes,

"for somewhere else - 

far above or far within -

a stronger voice takes up your tune:

true and clear, each note pure,

unwavering, brilliant, right.

And a chorus joins the solo,

in splendid harmonies of joy.

The cosmos sings your name - yours,

your unique melodic line - making whole

the symphony of the spheres.

Almost whole: One more voice 

is needed yet - Yours, yours - 

to sing the song to glory."

 

Sing my name, you ask me?

"Yes! For long before you sing your name, 

Somewhere your name was sung.

Listen! Listen! Hear and sing out strong!"

 

-Bill

Then Sings My Soul
        Sometimes I wish my parents had put something other than 'Janice' on my birth certificate. Maybe then, I'd have a song named for me like "Billie Jean" (Michael Jackson), or "Long Tall Sally" (Little Richard), or "Michelle" (Beatles), or . . . even "Waltzing Matilda!" Maybe then, I would have heard my name sung to me, at least by my mother. In fact, I can't recall my mother singing to me at all. One day at church, when I was about 3, standing on the pew next to where my mother was seated, I asked her Musicwhy she wasn't singing like everyone else was. She said, "I can't sing." As young impressionable minds usually do, I took on that identity for my own, growing up never singing. Many years later in a theology class on liturgy, as the class sang a Taize song in canon, our blind professor walked by my desk and stopped abruptly as if he stepped on a slice of glass. He said to the off-key voice (mine) "You are atonal, aren't you?!"
       Only years later did I hear my name sung during a retreat. It was the silent voice of some angel or prophet or Spirit singing through the lyrics from Isaiah 43:1,4: "I have called you by name, Janice, you are mine. You are precious in my sight and I love you." These lyrics marked the turning point from years of spiritual tepidity and acedia to a renewed conversion to Christ. By coincidence, the theme song for the Isaiah Missions I subsequently preached for 10+ years was "Because I Love You" again Isaiah 43 put into lyrics.
       I never thought much about singing; I certainly never thought about singing my name. I leave the singing to my soul. Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee; how great thou art, how great thou art! Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee; how great thou art, how great thou art!

                                                     --by Jan 

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Sincerely,  Bill Howden & Jan Davis
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