When I was about 10 our family moved across the state where my dad was starting a new church.  We left behind aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and the only neighborhood and house and school I'd ever known.

Sitting alone in the backyard on a tire swing hanging from an old tree, realizing that I didn't know anyone and couldn't "run up the street to grandma's house" I experienced lonliness, a deep aloneness, for the first time.  Yet, just as quickly, something else.  As the leaves of the tree rustled in the mild breeze, God showed up and put a melody in my heart.  It was there and then that we started singing our secret songs together.  I cannot explain that.  But He came to me and put a song in my heart.  We'd had encounters before.  I'd been a singing church girl, but this was just us and no matter what song I have ever since sung, no matter the venue or the event, none, I am certain, have been as true and pure as when I was a child - singing for Him and Him alone in our secret place.

That memory just hit me again powerfully when I visited Dan and Marianna's blog site where she shared a Jason Upton song from Youtube.  Jason tells the story of how he and his 3 year old son wrote a song together for Jesus and what he learned from it.  It is powerful.  Check it out here (all parents of small children - GO!  everyone else, too): http://thewakefields.wordpress.com/2007/12/06/jesus-would-you-come-play-with-me/

 "God, brilliant Lord, Yours is a household name.  Nursing infants gurgle choruses about You; toddlers shout the songs that drown out enemy talk and silence atheist babble."  Ps. 8.1-2

Praise Him…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF:  Get childlike. Get close and listen to my little grandbabies - where the purest praise is these days.