In Awe and Wonder of How Great Thou Art

Slowly the crowd came to its feet. Some laboriously used the row ahead for leverage. Over the attendees, silver glinted, like imperfect halos, caught by the lighting above.

Although the gathering, a conference on intentional Christian grandparenting, had its share of “over-the-hill-ers,” a spattering of younger attendees also stood.   

Strains of the hymn, “How Great Thou Art,” filled the auditorium. The hymn swelled in four-part harmony through a congregation largely comfortable with “Thou’s,” “Thee’s,” “art’s,” and “wilt be’s.”

The timeline of our lives, sometimes a mere imagination, felt palpable in that great choir of voices.   

Perhaps not until one stands in a massive room with well over a thousand others for whom time’s hourglass is bottom heavy, do the words take flight as they did in this group of seasoned saints.

The hymn sang as a declaration of a Great God throughout all the accumulated years that were represented in that auditorium. Though we stood with frayed and worn edges, together we proclaimed His undeniable greatness.

As my husband and I sang with them, a sudden vibration brought him to reach into his pocket and bring out his phone. You see, we’d been anxiously waiting for news about the birth of our third great grandchild. We are on a roll.

And there on the screen was a bundled pink newborn with a giant bow on her fuzzy head. A tiny mummy-wrapped life announced herself very appropriately during the chorus of How Great Thou Art.

“6 lbs, 5 oz,” the text read. “Everyone doing great.”

And with the reverberation marveling at the Greatness of God, we paused within our souls, overcome with the absolute beauty of its truth.

In the scope of all eternity, our lives are just a tiny dot on God’s greater timeline.

But oh that dot. We feel its intensity daily.

It is the dot lived by Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Jacob, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, David and Samuel, all of them listed in Hebrews 11, often called the great hall of faith.

It is the same dot “others” unnamed within the chapter references, those of whom the world was not worthy.

They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated—of whom the world was not worthy—wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. (Hebrews 11:37–38 ESV)

This perspective locks onto something much greater than our now. It clings to  new breath and new life.

It reminds us of resurrection.

This clearing of focus, of looking far into the distance was how Jesus lived. It is how he drew his first breath and how He gave His last.

Who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2 ESV)

These tears, this laughter, our pains and sorrows, its breath and its heartbeat, the encompassing events day upon day, seems at times more real than what really is real. Or Who really is Great.

But there is another timeline than this throbbing physical existence of today. Its arrow points past the temporal to the eternal. It gives purpose to perseverance.

This Sunday we celebrate the resurrection. We pause like the disciples to look into an empty tomb and marvel at the triumph over death’s darkness. We fix our eyes on Jesus and rejoice.

For, the joy that was set before him, looked forward. It triumphed in the joy of our complete redemption, of our salvation from death to life, and heaven’s eternal home.   

Life, that of a newborn and that of the old, stands before the door of forever.

And this weekend, as we remember and ponder the great God who “raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. (Acts 2:24 ESV), may we also rejoice that Jesus looked beyond the cross and saw us.

Life, that of a newborn and that of the old, stands before the door of forever. Share on X

And may our hearts declare again, “How great Thou art.”