Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is by John Bell, “Though hope desert my heart”. As a contrast to yesterday’s about the joy of a wedding, this is a song of lament when times are troubled. The whole piece is in a minor key.
The words do not hold back from the realities that some people’s lives (or indeed most people’s at some points) are tough. Life is often difficult to handle, and at those times emotional as well as practical support can make all the difference to how someone copes. Without being specific about what causes these troubles – that will vary from one situation to another – the verses run through the kind of feelings that troubles bring. Lack of hope, strangeness, truth (of the inconvenient kind), lack of confidence, weariness, fruitless talk, threatening places, trials, hurt and a sense of being abandoned.
The refrain of verses 1 to 4 is short and to the point: “You have been here before”, ‘you’ being Jesus of course, who had these times in his own life. When his brothers turned against him, when the religious leaders accused him of Sabbath-breaking and worse, when the disciple Judas Iscariot betrayed him for money, when the crowd bayed for his blood, when all but one of his disciples fled from him at the cross. Verse 4 is more explicit that it was on the cross that he “felt all our hurt and more and cried in deep abandonment”.
The last verse looks to the future, still in a minor key and not pretending that life will necessarily get easier, but with more confidence in Jesus being with us: “I will not dread the dark, the fate beyond control, nor fear what reigns in frightening things: you will be there before”.