The church gathered to worship last Sunday, and I enjoyed everything about it, including the singing.

The young man who led us had chosen some wonderful songs of praise, and once or twice I had to find a tissue for brimming tears. (And I found one, thank goodness. On occasions I’ve been reduced to using the hem of my jacket or long skirt.) The sound of the congregation singing was not what moved me; much of the time I could barely hear the people around me. It was the words we sang that moved me.

I pay attention to words.

There was an old hymn we used to sing, one that anyone under thirty, possibly forty, has probably never heard: “Work for the Night Is Coming.“ As our congregation stood singing it one unfortunate Sunday night many years ago, a mental image of a phrase from that song got me tickled, so much so that my husband shot me “the look” I occasionally subdued our lively daughters with.

After all these years I can still hardly sing the song, and happily, I’m never asked to. The song exhorts disciples to work “‘til the last beam fadeth,“ for the night is coming “when man’s work is o’er.“ (“O’er,“ for the unschooled in old fashioned or poetic language, would be “over,“ though it sounds like something you mine.)

The old hymn, not of the great poetry ilk, is an enthusiastic, but very serious song, and I will never know why one of the phrases telling us when to work made me laugh—“Work,“ the line goes, “mid springing flowers.“

I stood there that evening and thought about “springing flowers” while everyone else finished the song without any noticeable problem.

Okay, I mused, I might work ‘mid silly, bored, or even mildly disgruntled flowers, but forget working anywhere near a bunch of insidious flowers waiting to spring on people just trying to do their work. The image brought to mind a cliché, though I know to avoid them: “Hey, if you can’t trust a flower, what or whom can you trust?“

I can not say why I got so carried away with those words. I do know they comprise the only phrase from a sacred song that I can’t sing because they make me laugh.

There are other phrases and lines, however, that I have been unable to sing for a worse reason—the dreadful reason that if I had sung them, I would be lying.

I’ll explain that unhappy statement next week.