Waiting Two Thousand Years and Never Wrong
Waiting Two Thousand
Years and Never Wrong
Being diagnosed with a serious illness has been the occasion for me to reflect back on my life and to see God‘s hand at work long ago. I wrote a poem almost 45 years ago. At the time the poem “came” to me with a musical tune. As a young man I had been traveling in Pakistan and India, often staying in the homes of people I knew or met. On more than one occasion, someone had asked me to “sing them a poem.”
Once in Kanpur India, staying with the Muslim father of a good friend from Pakistan (Abul Khair Kashfi), his elderly father asked me to “sing a poem.” I knew his was a pious family, and the songs I chose to sing were really hymns—“Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and “Amazing Grace.” He liked both hymns but especially liked the last verse of Amazing Grace, “when we’ve been there 10,000 years bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.” Later, as I was leaving Pakistan to go back to the west, I wrote my…
Being diagnosed with a serious illness has been the occasion for me to reflect back on my life and to see God‘s hand at work long ago. I wrote a poem almost 45 years ago. At the time the poem “came” to me with a musical tune. As a young man I had been traveling in Pakistan and India, often staying in the homes of people I knew or met. On more than one occasion, someone had asked me to “sing them a poem.”
Once in Kanpur India, staying with the Muslim father of a good friend from Pakistan (Abul Khair Kashfi), his elderly father asked me to “sing a poem.” I knew his was a pious family, and the songs I chose to sing were really hymns—“Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and “Amazing Grace.” He liked both hymns but especially liked the last verse of Amazing Grace, “when we’ve been there 10,000 years bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.” Later, as I was leaving Pakistan to go back to the west, I wrote my…