Dear Ones,
Happy weekend! Thank you for your prayers as we arrived safely to our son’s after the long trip. Wonderful to see them all and spent time visitng together and playing games both outdoors and indoors with the boys after we arrived. We feel bad for Andrea as she has an ear infection which leaves her feeling dizzy and nauseated. She is on meds and is better today for which we are thankful. We just got back from taking Mark out for a post birthday lunch and soon the boys will be home from school. I am going outside to hide hide candy eyeballs which they must find and pick up with Halloween claws!
Devotions from Judy’s heart
Those of us who grew up singing hymns will often find ourselves humming them as we go about our day or singing them as we travel to work. Somehow. we don’t forget the words as they seem indelibly imprinted on our hearts. Many hymns come from scripture so we are really memorizing verses from the Bible as we sing. I read on Crosswalk.com the stories behind the hymns and seems like each one was written in a time of difficulty as the author reached out to the Lord for help. The hymn, Savior Like a Shepherd Lead Me, appeared in a children’s hymnal in 1836. It was compiled by Dorothy Thrupp and some think she also wrote the words. The music was written by a teenager, William Bradbury, who was a music student in Boston. God used this hymn to save the life of a Union soldier as I will explain. Ira Stanley was a musician and worked with Dwight L. Moody. Ira sang this hymn at a gathering one night and later one of the guests pulled him aside and asked him an unusual question. He asked Ira if he was on guard duty and named a particular night in a certain place, and Ira replied that he in fact was. The other man said he had served in the Confederate Army and as a soldier he was about to shoot this very Union soldier when the soldier started singing, “Savior like a Shepherd lead us/ Much we need Thy tender care/ In Thy pleasant pastures feed us/ For our use Thy folds prepare/ Blessed Jesus, blessed Jesus/ Thou has bought us, Thine we are……” That caused the Confederate soldier to remember his own mother singing that hymn and he couldn’t shoot the Union soldier before him. That very hymn saved Ira’s life. Let us also remember that we are His sheep and He desires to care for us and lead us into all that He has for our lives. As David said in Psalm 95:6-7 (NRSV), “O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand.”
Challenge for today: Listen carefully to the voice of your shepherd.
Blessings on your weekend and prayers and love, Judy