And, still, we sing

What is it about hymns that makes us cry?

A worship service can be moving along just fine: everyone standing and sitting when they’re supposed to, liturgy and Scripture flowing without interruption, the sanctuary temperature miraculously just right … and then the congregation begins to sing “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” And suddenly, there it is. That lump in your throat.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the pew, the choir loft, or the pulpit. The tears come anyway. You blink them back, look up at the ceiling, press your fingernails into your palm as if you might will them away, but they fall just the same.

There’s something about these old words that doesn’t quite translate on the page. Read aloud, they are beautiful. But sung together, in a room full of people who are carrying their own stories of faith, they become something else entirely.

My daughter and I were talking about this on Sunday afternoon. She is in a season of deconstructing her faith, trying to discern what church means for her now. She had tuned in to the service where I was preaching that morning, and when the congregation began to sing, she found herself very emotional.

We talked about how hymns hold memory. How they carry with them the people and places that have shaped us. How certain lines are stitched into particular seasons of our lives, moments of grief or joy, belonging or questioning, and how, when we sing them again, those moments come rushing back.

We talked about how hymns connect us, not just to our own past, but to one another. And not just to those in the room, but to those who have come before us.

That connection felt especially close to the surface for me that day.

I was preaching at the Baptist Church of Beaufort, South Carolina, where my great-grandfather served as pastor from 1928 to 1931. My grandfather spent his teenage years there as a preacher’s kid. I walked through that sanctuary aware that I was stepping into a story much larger than my own.

I saw the place where the baptistry once stood in the floor—the one where my grandfather and his brother swam on Saturday nights before baptisms on Sunday mornings. I noticed the trees he might have climbed to avoid going to worship. I stood on the same wooden floors, looked out the same windows toward the cemetery, and sat in the same pews where he once sat.

The room was already thick with memory.

And then we sang.
“Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing…”

And somewhere in that moment, I could almost hear his voice: young, steady, singing along. Not just as a memory, but as part of that great cloud of witnesses that still surrounds us, still sings with us, still reminds us who we are and whose we are.

And I cried.

Maybe that’s what hymns do. They remind us that faith is never only our own. It is carried to us through generations; through voices that have sung these same words in different times and places, through lives that have held onto hope when it was fragile, through communities that have gathered again and again to sing what they believe, even when belief feels uncertain.

And, still, we sing.

Because somewhere in the singing, we find connection. To God. To one another. To the stories that shaped us. To the possibility that we are part of something still unfolding.

Maybe the tears come not because we are overwhelmed, but because we are remembering.

Remembering that we belong.
Remembering that we are not alone.
Remembering that our voices, however tentative or strong, are part of a song that did not begin with us and will not end with us.

And somehow, by grace, we are still invited to sing.

All love,
Leslie