Blessed Assurance
Over the years, people have asked me where my love of church singing came from. I always start by saying that generations of my family on my mother’s side were Methodists worshiping in small, country churches in North Carolina. My first memory of where I fit into this history occurred on one of the many visits we made to ‘my people’ around Franklin, North Carolina, which is located in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
My mother and her family moved to Ohio during the Great Depression like so many other ‘hill people,’ but a big part of their hearts and souls remained in North Carolina. We would make the pilgrimage from Ohio through the Smokies every summer to visit family, and the patriarch of the family was my great-grandfather, James Young, who was fondly referred to by all as Papa Young.
I have been told I had a special place in Papa Young’s heart as his first great-grandchild, but whether that is true or not, I adored him and he always gave me plenty of his attention. Papa Young always wore a white dress shirt and suspenders to hold up his pants, along with a straw fedora. Every Sunday, Papa Young would walk down the dirt road in front of his house to Hickory Knoll Methodist Church. One Sunday, when we were visiting, the church had a potluck lunch followed by a hymn sing. This is my first memory of being captivated with singing hymns, and the hymn I remember the most is Blessed Assurance, as it was Papa Young’s favorite and he belted it out with great enthusiasm as I stood beside him.
We sang Blessed Assurance at his funeral, my grandmother’s funeral, at my mother’s funeral and I want it sung at mine. “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! O what a foretaste of glory divine!” If you look it up in the hymnal (369), those two lines do have exclamation marks, which is unusual in hymns. Think about it the next time you sing it.
There is a great deal to be said for connections to our past and I love thinking back to the generations before me who were singing the same hymns we do today. They give us comfort and joy and a way to express our love of God that I have never been able to duplicate in any other way. And that is the origin of my love for church music.
Lee McGivney