There was a time I would be lying if I sang along with everyone else: “I’ll go where you want me to go, dear Lord.“ I still cannot sing one of the lines from a hymn that has been updated and is sung often today: “Take My Life and Let It Be.“

All the lines are beautiful expressions of commitment, but one is so obviously not true that I let everyone else make the assertion without me.

For some reason I can tentatively sing the sort of general “Take my silver and my gold.“ But the next phrase is so literal, so specific and sweeping, that it makes me mute: “not a mite would I withhold.“

The lady who wrote it meant it. Frances Ridley Havergal wrote the poem on February 4, l874, after spending the night in prayer, seeking a deeper consecration of herself to God. Each couplet describes the writer, a woman committed to saving the lost, a woman who gave her fifty pieces of jewelry “fit for a countess” and the jewel cabinet they were kept in to a missionary organization to sell and use as needed (Albert Bailey’s, The Gospel in Hymns 405).

I like to think that both my husband and I are learning to be more and more generous, in order to be more like our God, who is extravagantly generous. Yet, while Francis Havergal sold her jewelry, I’m still allowing my husband to buy me jewelry on special occasions. So, believe me, I find it impossible to sit in church, my new pearl ring gracing my finger, and sing “not a mite will I withhold.“ The issue is further complicated by my knowing full well I will let the offering plate pass without emptying my bank account into it, or even my billfold very often.

Once this honesty became such an issue for me, it began to complicate so many songs. Is it any more honest to sing “I Surrender All,“ when I could list several things I still am having trouble surrendering.
The only songs that are really completely safe for me are praise songs, but I even ran into trouble with one of them recently, one of my favorites:
     As a deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after thee.
     You alone are my heart’s desire, and I long to worship thee.
I suppose I should be satisfied with three out of four assertions, but the third one gets my attention, asks “Really?“ and makes the others suspect. Is He, alone, really my heart’s desire? Oh, we desire so many things.

My point?

Until recently it would have been that when we sing, we should pay close attention to what we are professing, and sing only what we mean! I still think that’s a good idea. But I’ve finally come to look at it a little differently.

I now believe I can sing everything, and it will either be a testimony of my life with God or it will be a prayer of petition to Him. I think “I’ll go where you want me to go” has become a testimony. “You alone are my heart’s desire” is still a prayer.

It is so much easier to sing praise and devotion than to live it. I once thought of that as something of a cynical reproach, but I don’t any longer. Of course, singing is easier, but when we think of our songs as testimony or petition, God has one more tool to make our lives as beautiful as our songs.

And, come prepared, such singing might require a tissue.