By R.G. Huff
Tomorrow marks the end of my 75th year. “Happy birthday to me” and all that! Almost every Sunday of those three-score-and-fifteen years, I have found myself in church … praying, listening, learning — and singing the hymns and gospel songs that shaped my faith.
The first hymn we sing today is unknown to me, but I intend to sing it as if it is part of my memory-bank of hymnody. Set to the very familiar AURELIA tune, David Gambrell has penned a fine text to set us on our way into our stewardship emphasis, closing each stanza with John Calvin’s motto, “Sincerely and completely I offer you my heart.”
What we offer to the great God of blessing makes a difference. That’s why we call that time of plate-passing the offertory or the offering.
My mother, a first-grade teacher, taught me many things in creative, symbolic ways. One that sticks out to me is how she helped me understand tithing. As a young child, I couldn’t calculate a percentage, so she took a 10 by 2-inch piece of cardboard, covered it with pale blue construction paper and marked off 10 squares with a Magic Marker. The first square she covered with red construction paper. (I hope you are picturing all of this!) In the center of each square she glued down a dime, so there was a dollar’s worth of 10-cent coins.
She explained that the first dime of every dollar belonged to God, and that we Christian people set that aside first and then decide how to spend the other nine. “Sometimes you may give God another dime, but you always give him the first one,” she concluded.
The closing hymn this morning is a favorite of many of us, I’m sure. The sturdy Irish tune supports words that carry so much honesty about our faith experience and our sincere desire to always set our eyes upon Christ, our “best thought by day or by night, waking or sleeping.”
This hymn calls us to commitment to be good stewards of many segments of our life, but for today’s emphasis, the third stanza speaks of riches and human adulation by which we do not want to be controlled because Christ himself is our final inheritance. Then comes the hearkening to the opening hymn’s theme: “Thou and thou only first in my heart.” With this, the circle of singing is complete.
By the way, somewhere in our attic, deep in a plastic tub marked “Stuff from Pigeon Forge,” you’ll find a somewhat faded construction-paper teaching aid with all 10 dimes still attached, each bearing my mother’s latent finger prints. What we learn early stays with us the longest.