Living a Faith-Filled Life

This is my third speech for Toastmasters. After I heard The Lutheran Hour on the radio last week, I knew I wanted to do my speech on this favorite old hymn.

When I was a little girl, my cousins and I would often find ourselves at our Great Aunt Liza’s house. We cousins had mixed thoughts about her. She was very old. Her house smelled old to our young noses. She served weird pickled vegetables, and loved to hug us (even though she had whiskers.) We did feel sorry for her, since her husband died when I was very little, and all her children had either been stillborn or died in infancy.

One of my favorite memories is her old upright piano which we weren’t allowed to play around with. After a meal, Great Aunt Liza would gather all of us around the piano and order us to sing with her. We children would try to see the fine print of the hymnal she played from. One song in particular still sings in my memory.

Aunt Liza started singing her favorite song loud and strong. We all joined in. But, then one by one, we all dropped out. Somewhere in the middle of the song, Aunt Liza had unknowingly switched from English to German, her native language. She reprimanded us for dropping out of her favorite song. She didn’t believe us when we tried to tell her that she was singing words we didn’t know and couldn’t follow!

I think of her every time I sing that old, familiar hymn.

Now, let me tell you the story behind my Great Aunt Liza’s favorite hymn:

The year was 1637.  The place – Eilenberg, Germany. A Lutheran pastor, Martin Rinkart had arrived in the city nearly 30 years before, at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ war. Eilenberg, a walled city had become a refuge for political and military fugitives. The overcrowding led to many people dying from famine, the Plague and repeated attacks from armies.

At one point in 1637, the plague was so severe, Pastor Rinkart was the only pastor remaining in Eilenberg. He had performed more than 4000 funerals that year alone, including most of his family. 

After the plague, such a severe famine hit the land, that when a bird or cat dropped dead in the street, 30 or 40 people would fight over the carcass.

Despite the tremendous human loss, the hunger, the pain, Pastor Martin Rinkart wrote these words:

Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done, in Whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers’ arms has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts and blessèd peace to cheer us;
And keep us in His grace, and guide us when perplexed;
And free us from all ills, in this world and the next!

All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given;
The Son and Him Who reigns with Them in highest Heaven;
The one eternal God, whom earth and Heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore.

As we join our family and friends around the Thanksgiving table this week, we may be thankful for all the great things in our lives. Or, maybe we are overwhelmed by the negatives – our bills, a health problem, a recent death in the family.

Martin Rinkart wasn’t thankful for the world around him. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t thankful when he went to bed exhausted from doing 50 funerals a day, with a stomach growling from hunger, and strangers begging for food.

He was thankful for God and for the promise God had given him – that promise of heaven, where according to Revelation, Jesus “ will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

He was thankful that he had a Hope beyond the world around him, beyond the dismal life and the war that seemed like it would never end.

Do you ever find it difficult to be thankful in all circumstances? Join Pastor Martin Rinkart, my Great Aunt Liza, and me.  This Thanksgiving, look beyond your current situation to something and Someone bigger than yourself.