I post hymns that we sang in our Plymouth Brethren church when I was a child. It’s amazing how I don’t remember many of the sermons, except for that one with the “chart of time from eternity to eternity” display, but I do remember the hymns.

Every once in a while one will spontaneously come to mind, words of hope, words of adoration, words of sanctity all sung in unison without instruments. As we sang you could occasionally hear individual voices, the high wobbly notes of a grandma or an off key bass in the pew behind you,  but good singer or not everyone did what they could. In a church noted, as I recall, for being fairly somber every ounce of piety and emotion would be directed into hymns. Maybe that was a German thing, soul placed into music.

Regardless even after all these years they’ve stuck with me, the well of my childhood full of faith, and I draw on them from time to time. What an odd mixture, Plymouth Brethren hymns and Orthodox prayers. Yet there have been more than a few times when the “night watches” have been filled with both before sleep closes my eyes once again.

staying up to midnight on rare occasion and watching the TV channels go off the air. No infomercials, no reruns, no news people trying to say something important at two in the morning. Midnight came, they said a little something about the station’s channel and broadcast capacities, played the national anthem, and then test pattern. Sometime in the early morning they’d fire the whole station back up again with a news or farm show.

We did okay, in fact we did better than okay. Some people think its the end of the world but more often than not I think its just a matter of TV trying to fill empty air with empty news.

to my brother who also reads this blog.