A precious friend of mine, someone I consider an angel walking this earth, shared this with our Sunday School class through tears this past Sunday. I asked her if I could share it here, because it's just too powerful not to pass along. God bless you Sarah....and Granny B.
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What is in YOUR Box?
Late on Wednesday evening, my dear, sweet Granny B sent me this email:
“Dear, dear Sarah.......You are just the one to share a beautiful hymn we sang Sunday.....this is the way the 3rd verse is written :
‘For the love of God is broader than the measure of our mind;
And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind!!’
That absolutely melts me!!!! We just fail miserably to accept God's love!!!
The name of the hymn is: There's a Wideness in God's Mercy....... To my recollection it is not sung real often but should be!!!!!”
Of course, a note from Granny B always brightens my day. She has an amazing gift of hospitality; she makes every person that she talks with feel like the most special person in the world. I often think of Hebrews 13:2 when it comes to her: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for in doing so, some have entertained angels without knowing it.” She also is the best at following God’s “nudges”—you know those little thoughts that come into your mind like “I should call so and so” or “Wouldn’t so and so love this?” or “I have got to share that with so and so.” So, it did not surprise me that Granny B had once again followed one of those promptings and sent me this email (you have to love a 89 year old who knows her way around an iPad). I went to bed happy.
I went on about the next couple of days doing the things that make up my days: chores, errands, meetings, shuttling kids here and there. I also finally made some good progress on “The Box.” “The Box” had taken up residence in my playroom and had been moved around more times than I care to count over its 15-month stay at our house. As part of my New Year’s resolution to take care of those annoying little things that eat up my bandwidth, I was determined to take care of “The Box”once and for all.
So what was in “The Box”? Well, about a year and a half ago, someone set fire to the music suite at my church. Thankfully, no one was injured and the building itself was fine, but there was hundreds of thousands of dollars of smoke damage to area including the music library. Thousands upon thousands of pieces of sheet music were covered in soot. The only way to save them was to hand clean them. Church members stepped up to clean them sheet by sheet, box by box. Since my husband, Matt, was in the choir, and this was very near and dear to his heart, I volunteered to take several boxes to help out. Well, I did a pretty good job finishing off the first two, but I ran out of steam when it came to the third and final box. I just could not work up the time and space to finish it off. Thus, “The Box” became a semi-permanent fixture of our playroom.
Well, it did until last weekend, when I opened it up and began going through the first song in the box. I finished that up on Wednesday and grabbed the next collection in the box and set to work on that. Last night (Saturday), as I was about to finish work on the song I opened on Wednesday, I actually stopped and looked at the music I was cleaning. And there it was. For the last three days, I had been cleaning our church’s choir copy of “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy.” I could not believe it. Granny B’s song had been in my hands this whole time.
Now I was a math major in college, so I know a little something about probabilities. In my head, I can multiply the fractions: the chance a fire would be set at our church in the music suite, the chance that the one box with that one song out of hundreds was given to our family, the chance that I opened the box on that day after it had sat in my house for well over a year, the chance I got to that song on that day, the chance that Granny B’s church (of a different denomination a thousand miles away) sang that song on Sunday, the chance that she chose me to tell out of all the people I know she writes on a regular basis, the chance that she waited until Wednesday to email me. The math tells me it is more than one in a hundred million. My brain tells me I’m not that lucky.
The scary thing about this story is that I did not stop and really look at the sheet music until I was almost finished cleaning it. I was this close to missing a huge blessing in my life. So when something like this happens to you what do you do with it? I have to feel like God is at work here—“coincidence” as his way of remaining anonymous. His message to me? I’m still working on that, but a few things come to mind. Slow down. Don’t be so focused on your work that you miss my blessings--that you miss me being so present in your life. There is beauty in the mundane. Good things can come out of bad. Follow my nudges. Tell your story. Grandmothers are the best. And always, sing beautiful music.
I cannot help but think that part of God’s plan is for me and this simple, but beautiful story, is to share with you the words to this hymn, because as Granny B mentioned, it is not one that a lot of churches sing often. It should be.
“There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy”
by Frederick W. Faber and John Purifoy
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in his justice which is more than liberty.
There is welcome for the sinner and more graces for the good.
There is mercy with the Savior, there is healing, there is healing in his
blood.
But we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own;
And we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own.
For the love of God is broader than the measure of one’s mind;
And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.
If our love were but more simple, we could take him at his word;
And our lives would be more loving in the likeness, in the likeness of
our Lord.
Amen.
**Ephesians 2:8**
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