Set Your Seal Upon My heart and Live in Me

Take, o take me as I am.
Summon up what I shall be.
Set your seal upon my heart and live in me.
~ John L. Bell, 1995

                                                                                                                                                     Song
     On Wednesdays I will be writing about songs that companion us on the path. These are words and melodies that can join us on the journey and lift our spirits as we make our way. Some we've sung for as long as we can remember. Others are new in our recent memory, but somehow feel like they have been blended in to who we are. Take, o take me as I am is a song that has been companioning  my faith journey for a decade or more. An easy melody and powerful words. 

​​Take, o take me as I am.
     This is not a “I’ve got it all figured out” song. It is not an “everyone should pray to grow up to be just like me” song. Instead this is a song that knows vulnerability, knows deep and dreadful loss, knows the aching sense of it is growing darker and I’m not sure I can hold out for the light song. This is a song sung softly when you know that the only thing left is to file for divorce. This is a song held lightly when depression is coming and there is not way out but through. This is a song that shows up for us when we are truly not sure we can show up for ourselves.

Summon up what I shall be.
     Lent can be a long, drawn-out season for some of us. Here in these winter letting-go and spring’s daring-to-come days, we can nevertheless feel the hope found in two small words: not yet. Here in this Lenten time we know the cold and darkness and we are invited into what is surely coming. For me. For you. And for all those we are loving into more hopeful moments that can bring us into hours and then into days of something new.

Set your seal upon my heart and live in me.
     Words of faith, songs of faith live in these comin’ on days (God bless you, Bill Mallard). Lenten music journeys with us down hallways, through doorways, into places we would rather not enter. These melodies lead us in and through moments that if we journeyed alone, we just might collapse, we might just be done in. Rooted in, held by faith that we have known our whole lives long this song reassures us that all the while, God is right there beside us. God is with us nudging us on, ever encouraging us to keep singing.   

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