The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing (Zephaniah 3:17)
The brilliant sun glistened on the peaceful waters of the cove, but I felt none of the serenity of this popular retreat. For some time now, a feeling of loss and displacement had been metastasizing in my soul; penetrating the defenses I had spent years building.
Perhaps it was the recent loss of my mother, but over the course of the last few years, I had become painfully aware of the gap in my life caused by the absence of a father-daughter relationship during most of my growing up years. “Lord,” I had prayed earlier this week, “You promised to be a father to the fatherless. I have missed so much!”
“You are always so confident and composed.” I smiled wryly to myself as Anne’s compliments broke into my reverie. I studied her honest, sincere face. A recent acquaintance, she had no idea of the churning in my spirit.
I pulled myself back to the peaceful, sunlit scene. Perhaps it was the calm, soothing cadence of the water lapping onto the side of the cove, but I was suddenly stirred by a memory of my father, strumming his guitar. He often sang to us—mostly Country ballads, and sometimes old gospel hymns.
But the songs in this memory were distinctive. In his travels, my father had picked up an old LP record, featuring inspirational songs by American folk singer Burl Ives, with a group of children.
The record had been old and scratchy, and any trace of a label had long since disappeared. We only knew it was Burl Ives because we were familiar with his unique folksy voice. As for the children, we had no idea who they were, but the clear purity of their voices touched the core of my childish soul.
I could still hear in my memory every nuance of their sweet, lilting, non-English accent: “There is a fountain filled with blood.” The pure, soothing childish voices still haunted my heart a lifetime and 3000 miles later, reviving the safety of sweet childhood innocence and my father singing over me.
“How I would love to get my hands on that album!” Even before the half-wish had formed, I had scoffed it out of existence. What, after all, would be the odds of finding an album I had heard a million years ago, featuring an American folk singer and some unknown children from a distant country? I could not even do an Internet search with the limited information I had.
So why did the thought persist? Teasing my brain, reminding me that here at the retreat, there was an old thrift shop where I had found “treasures” from time to time? Telling me that perhaps, among the stacks of old albums I had seen there...
I quickly dismissed the absurd idea. How could I, on a day trip, in the most obscure nook of all the nooks and crannies in the world, find a relic from my shattered childhood—a vague memory that dogged me with bitter-sweet nostalgia? And yet, a few minutes later, as I instinctively veered towards the corner where stacks and stacks of old dusty albums teetered, I just knew it was here.
As my fingers grasped the faded jacket of the album, I could hardly see through the tears the name of the children’s choir whose identity had been a mystery for so long, but whose music had been imprinted on my memory amid a massive tangle of love and regret. Trembling, I read out loud: Burl Ives and The World Vision Korean Orphan Choir Sing of Faith and Joy.
Later, at home, as I listened through a storm of emotions to the sweet strains of Jesus Loves Even Me, I wondered what had become of these orphans. And then it dawned on me. They too, like me, had a heavenly Father, an Abba, Daddy, who promised to be a father to the fatherless. A Father who has left a promise through His Son, "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you" (John 14:18).
A Father who still sings over me.
