King of Glory

"It's OK," my husband reassured the choir members.  "My wife knows this song."

We had been at church all evening for the regular choir practice but I had been with the children's choir and had not realized what was going on with everyone else. The song scheduled for that Sunday was a solo by a young woman whose daughter had come down with pneumonia and was in a children's hospital two hours away. My husband had spent the evening throwing together a last minute substitution - one in which the choir only had to learn a few lines at the very end of the song.

I took the sound track and headed home. As I listened to it in the car, the realization hit me that I did not know the song! As Minister of Music, my husband spent hours listening to music and selecting appropriate (and doctrinally sound!) music for each service. The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir has always been some of our favorite music for that very reason. It occurred to me that this song was on an album which we had recently purchased, so I was not familiar with it yet.

I spent the next two days with it, listening again and again until I could nearly sing it in my sleep. On Sunday morning we did the final run-through - - which was really the one-and-only run-through. My husband read the scripture and I began to sing. Apparently, the choir had not heard the song in it's entirety up to that point, and the tears began to fall.

It has become one of my all-time favorites. Sometimes I pop the CD into my car and listen to it, then repeat it and listen again. I had it on in the car again the other day. When my little boy heard the mournful minor chords early in the song he said, "This is when Jesus died on the cross." He had been learning  about it in Sunday school as Easter was approaching.  In the middle of the song, as he listened to the music crescendo, he announced, "This is when Jesus rose from the dead!"

Yes, it is, my precious boy! Yes it is.