Every evening before I place Carter in his bed for the night, there are several songs that I sing to him as part of our bedtime routine. They are all songs that were sung to me as a child and have very special meaning. One of my favorite childhood songs is "Jesus Loves Me." I don't ever recall a time when I didn't know the words and tune because my parents sang it to me since birth. It is such a well known song, that I'm sure most Christians in the English speaking world know the tune by heart. When I hear "Jesus Loves Me" I instantly flash back to the days of children's church and memory verses; a time of innocence and zeal for learning new Bible stories. It used to be my very favorite song, until one day I grew up and thought it was meant only for young children to sing.
Now that I have a child of my own, I sing "Jesus Loves Me" every night. One evening as I was singing, I became curious of the song's origin. So, I typed the title under a Wikipedia search and I discovered that the simple chorus that we know is only a very small part of the song. The entire song, originally a poem, is quite beautiful and tells the redemption story. I was touched to learn that the tune was created to sing the poem to comfort a child who was dying. Check out the link to read the rest of the story. It may inspire you, as it did me, to a new love of an old song.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Loves_Me
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4 comments:
Very interesting! I, too, love this song. We sing it daily. :)
What a neat post. I'll have to check out the rest of the song. I have two favorite songs that I sang to my boys as babies...we still sing them occasionally, although the boys have lots of other song requests these days. One is "All Night, All Day," which I actually remember learning in elementary school music class. The other is called "Good Night, Sleep Tight" and is one that we learned when Will was a baby from a Focus on the Family CD we received in the mail. It's great! Oh...and another good one is "Close Your Eyes" by Go Fish! Maybe I can download them for you some time! Sweet dreams!
An interesting anecdote about this song:
The famous Christian theologian Karl Barth was asked in 1962 (late in his life) how he would summarize the essence of the millions of words he had published, he replied, "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so."
You can read more about Barth, including this incident, here.
I was one of the parents with whom you sang that wonderful song. I am so glad that Carter will have the benefit of learning its simple majesty.
Love you very much,
Dad
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