Leaning on the Everlasting Arms

I wrote this blog last summer, but I published it in my other, other blog, and don’t think I put it in this one—at least I can’t find it.  Hymns bring back many memories.  This one reminds me of my sister, Carol.
We sang that old hymn at the dockside service at Lakeside last Sunday, Sept. 4.  Published in 1887, it tells of the assurance of God's steadfast care and guidance in tough times, and offers the peace of a relationship with him.  I grew up in the Church of the Brethren where I don't recall we sang anything that had a beat--and then in 1974 became a Lutheran and they missed out on those twangy camp songs too, being mostly ethnic Scandinavians (in our synod).  The first time I heard it was in Flat Creek, Kentucky in 1956 where my sister Carol was a volunteer church worker through Brethren Volunteer Service.  Because she was only 19 at the time, and I was her "little" sister, I was stunned at the level of spiritual and social responsibility she had.  Like riding horseback into the mountains to provide Sunday school in areas that had no passable roads; working in the garden and taking care of chickens (and plucking them) for food for the staff (I think there were 5 people living in a little house); helping the local women with sewing and. . . leading hymns like this one.  In that area of the country it was sung like a dirge and a capella--not peppy and clappy the way we did it at dockside with an electronic organ. Carol went to be with the Lord in 1996, but every time I hear "Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms; leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms," I think of that amazing, fearless teen-ager.  Now I keep track of her 5 grandchildren (4 teens) on Facebook, Will, Jenny, Rachel, Catie and Chris.

Carol's BVS unit 1955. Wearing white blouse, looking between two women in the second row. She also helped flood victims in Pennsylvania, canvassed a neighborhood in Denver for a church plant, and was a "guinea pig" for the NIH. In 1957 she entered Goshen College in Indiana where she got her RN

A Note from my brother-in-law:

In 1940, my parents sent me to work on a farm of a distant relative-by-marriage. At that time we lived in uptown Mnhattan, New York but the dream was to leave the city at some point and start a chicken farm. I ended up near a little village on the Eastern Shore of Maryland called Trappe and worked hard and long for Graham Price and his wife Adeline and two daughters that whole summer. I didn't learn much about chickens but Graham had 7 acres of tomatoes and I learned the rigors of that crop many times over.
Graham belonged to a group I had never heard of called Pilgrim Holiness; we went to church every Sunday morning and every Wednesday evening at a little town called Oxford, which was almost on the Chesapeake Bay.

One Sunday morning they sang a hymn that I - a baptized and confirmed United Lutheran Church in America boy - had never heard called What a Fellowship. And when they would sing the refrain: Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms, the ladies would lift their arms and swing them back and forth in the air. I remember I couldn't wait to get back to the farm that day to write my mom and dad and tell them of the experience.

And yet, now in the Brethren Hymnal Supplement, hymn number 1081 is What a Fellowship and it is a hymn we sing frequently. In fact, I have arranged it as an anthem for soprano/alto chorus with optional congregational participation. And even more interesting is the fact that the text was by Anthony Johnson Showalter, a very distant relative of Vernon (and Jean) Showalter who go to the Mount Morris Church of the Brethren.

Everything comes around.
Nel