Went to an old style revival recently and I've got to say that the song service was about as current as the hoop skirt. But you know, there's something rich there. Not about hoop skirts, but about the 'old paths'. At one point during the singin, a guy that was a couple of steps from a long nap in a deep ditch took up the mic and kept the Parkinson's shimmy away long enough to bellow through three verses of 'Blessed Assurance'. I wept. I smelled the aged vinyl of mom's old purse and felt it under my head as I lay on the floor of the Nazarene church in Deland, Fla. I was three years old all over again.
At the time I didn't know or care much about the song, but now, to hear it sung by a seasoned pair of passionate lungs is worth more than gold. I watched, however, as an elderly man sang it as if his life depended on it. I guess it does, and he knows it. Truth is, that we tend to let things age to the point that they offer nothing to us anymore except for dead memories from a rusty recollection. But truth worth knowing is worth remembering. The truth in the lines like, 'Blessed Assurance Jesus is mine, oh what a foretaste of Glory Divine, Heir of salvation, purchase of God, born of His Spirit, washed in His blood' or 'filled with His goodness, lost in His love' these make me realize that the truth that took so long to realize was right in front of me all this time. Divine revelation ages far better than temporal things. All that is Holy wears well as if the suppressive power of time has no authority to diminish the gleaming beauty of that foretaste of Glory Divine. All that is temporal simply succumbs to the forces arrayed against it and, unlike truth, turns to dust. That reminds me. I guess it's time to get mom a new purse.