Music has a way of giving us hope and healing our hearts, heart, then and now.
Captured by Nazis during WWII and shuffled among prisons in Scotland, Belgium, and England, young Jurgen Moltmann witnessed the horror of invasion and endured hardships of little food, no heat, and constant illness. Many fellow soldiers despaired.
“I saw how other men collapsed inwardly, how they gave up all hope, sickening for the lack of it, some of them dying. The same thing almost happened to me,” Phillip Yancy quotes Moltmann in his book Experiences of God.
What saved Moltmann? What gave him hope? The Psalms.
They were included in a New Testament that an army chaplain gave him and opened his eyes to “the God who is with those ‘that are of a broken heart.'”
After his release in 1948, he left his field of physics and became a leading theologian, known best for his book The Theology of Hope.
Sweet Song of Hope
In my thirties, a dark cloud descended on me out of the blue. Fear then depression. I was a mess.
I asked, “Why God?” and stuttered prayers.
All alone–this is how I felt though my biblical beliefs spoke “Immanuel–God with us.”
It’s no wonder my thinking sunk into the swamp of negativity.
What saved me? What have me hope?
Modern-day “psalms.” The lyrics and melodies of Amy Grant, Steve Green, Michael Card, Vineyard, Twila Paris, and Steven Curtis Chapman–among others–helped to renew my thinking and pull me through.
Yes, I read the Bible and prayed and attended church–all the things of “good Christian girls.” But music grew my hope the best. It healed my heart. It provided the expectation of better times and God’s goodness.
