Our Story Grows
"Sitting on the Throne" And to the lamb forever and ever Blessing and reverence and Dignity and power be
These words belong to a Christian hymn written in Turkish, perhaps one of my favorite hymns... During the worship times in our church when I was leading, for some reason, this melody often was in my playlist.
The pieces left from the story of this hymn are quite faint today... David Goodman... He left his own home to share God's good news with other people, settling in another country, in Turkey.
His wife was pregnant, two months left until their baby was due. One day, the doorbell rang...
In the 1980s, when there were no cell phones, and even home phones were very rare, there used to be a lot of unexpected visitors 🙂
One day, the doorbell rang in that way, and David answered the door. The person who rang the door, fired the gun he had brought with him to kill David, and that day David started his first day in eternal life... In those days, because there were no social media, Instagram, and such, this news was heard and known by very few people. Of course, David was killed because of his faith. There are many people around the world who suffer and are killed while serving Jesus Christ, but what makes David special for me is actually very simple. A hymn he left behind. Everyone leaves traces in life. Don't get me wrong, everyone does wrong and right things, but some of these (both wrong and right ones) leave traces in other people's lives, these traces grow like seeds later, become memories, stories, sometimes they become songs. They circulate from mouth to mouth, are written in diaries, even in blogs sometimes.
What I'm saying is, our stories are larger than we think, sometimes our children tell them to their own children, our friends to their friends. Our brothers from the church tell them sometimes to people we don't know. I also tell slices from the stories of my friends when I chat, when I preach. So, I sow the stories I've witnessed into other people's hearts, and God waters these and uses them to prepare people for His arrival.
We also took a hymn that David wrote a song while worshipping God into our hearts and his story sprouted in the hearts of many people...
Your testimony is the same... Today while thinking about this, I wanted to share it with you.
Here I am linking the hymn written by David and what his son, who was born 2 months after David died, wrote about his father on his blog site...