Higher Ground

When the Voices of Praise started singing “Higher Ground” on Sunday morning, I was transported back to Spruce Grove Baptist Church in West Virginia.  I was a little girl of six or seven standing next to my mom, with the songbook balanced on the back of the dark wooden pew, following along as the big folks sang and I learned the words.  I still remember the picture the song made in my head of a dusty path winding up and up a mountain.  I couldn’t figure out what a “table land” was—and I’m still not entirely sure—but it seemed to me to be a sunny, happy place since everyone wanted to be there.  Hearing the song again after so many years, I sensed again the urging to be better and strive upward to a place of service and blessing.

Another old thing that I saw in a new light this week was the fourth chapter of John.  We are studying the book in Sunday School, and we’ve been watching dramatizations of it as we go.  It has been eye opening to see the old stories in a new way—to see, really see, Jacob’s well and the woman standing there talking to Jesus. I always knew she was a real person, but to see an actual woman and to watch the expression on her face as she realized she was talking to the Messiah was a new and moving experience.

Dr. Euler talked on Sunday morning about looking at Genesis in a new way. This book about the very oldest of humans is coming alive with fresh ideas to me. I’m so glad that we deal with eternal truths that never really get old.  And yet, they seem new and interesting time after time.  Ecclesiastes reminds us that “there is no new thing under the sun” (1:9).  However, at the end of his search for meaning in life, the writer concludes that the only meaningful life is one in which we “fear God and keep his commandments (12:13).  This kind of life keeps being renewed and refreshed.

Lamentations 3:22-24 speaks of newness alongside stability: “It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.  They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. ‘The LORD is my portion,’ says my soul; ‘therefore will I hope in him.’”

My prayer for all of you—and for myself—this week is to find fresh energy and new ideas in the old, the tried, and the true. May each of us press on to “higher ground” with God and “catch a gleam of glory bright” that we have never seen before.

--Sherry Poff