Lifted

Yesterday about 7:00 a.m., I was sitting on the porch of Cracker Barrel saying my rosary and waiting for Sally to meet me for breakfast. It was a nice breezy morning, and there was some kind of nice greenery blowing in the breeze in front of the restaurant. It was very peaceful and pleasant--a nice break from several days of moving around from place to place and making a million phones calls to the insurance company and the contractor.

There was Country and Western music playing on the speakers. One song called "Way Down South," had a line that went, "I kissed girls and I shot squirrels." I thought this was the quintessesence of C&W music. It made me laugh.Then, they played a song by Kenny Rogers that was based on an old hymn, "Love Lifted Me." Rogers has messed around with it a good deal and taken out all the embarrassing Jesus parts, but he left the refrain pretty much the same, and when he got to the refrain, it really got to me. The original lyrics go:

Love lifted me,
Love lifted me,
When nothing else would help
Love lifted me.

And it is Love who lifts me--Love who keeps me from feeling too sorry for myself and helps me to keep going when I'm feeling totally exhausted and befuddled. Love who keeps me from ever asking why this happened to me. I mean, why not me? Love who fills me with the belief that this is somehow His gift .

Yesterday, I had a few minutes and I looked around (listened around) some YouTube videos because I wanted to find a few different versions of the song and post them here, but I couldn't find any that suited me. The version that I really wish you could hear is Miss Gilmore's version. It was Miss Gilmore that first introduced me to the hymn. Almost 40 years ago, Miss Gilmore and I were in the same prayer group. I was a young mother in her mid-20s, and Miss Gilmore was a little old lady in the most wondeful sense of the phrase. She was really little, and she was really, really old. She lived alone on a former farm in rural Mississippi and raised chickens. Every now and then in the middle of the prayer meeting, she would raise her high, quavery voice and sing about how Love lifted her, and it always lifted us. Miss Gilmore didn't have much, but she had the one thing needful.

So here's B. J. Thomas singing "Love Lifted Me." It's not great, but if you've never heard the hymn before, it will give you an idea of what it sounds like.

I can't believe that actually worked. It's the first time I've ever had to type the html to embed something. This computer has a mind of it's own which, I suppose, is the reason that all this post had to be in italics, and you can't copy and paste anything. Also, it tells me that both Sally's and Maclin's blogs have questionnable content and therefore I can't access them.

AMDG