Not every couple can say their first date took place at a “gospel sing,” but that’s precisely where my grandparents, Boyce and Sybil Lindley, chose to have theirs in the summer of 1956. She piled into Boyce’s dark green ’54 Ford with both her grandmother and best friend, Shelby Jean, in tow as chaperones, and they made the 70-mile drive from Blytheville, Arkansas to Ellis Auditorium in Memphis, Tennessee. Sitting in the tawny wooden chairs of the balcony, they clapped and sang along with the Blackwood Brothers and were treated to an impromptu performance by a new rock and roll sensation—Elvis Presley—who joined the Statesmen for two songs.
On the ride home, while their escorts slept soundly in the backseat, Sybil asked Boyce if he had enjoyed the evening. Thankfully, he said he’d liked it very much. “Anyone who wants me to even consider a second date has to love gospel music as much as I do,” she told him.
Throughout their 55-year marriage, they’ve spent countless hours performing together in church. My favorite story about their time as musicians involved their first service at a new church in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. Like most visitors, they and their two daughters sat in the back row, taking in the place and its people, when the pastor welcomed them from the pulpit. He sheepishly asked, “Ma’am, you don’t happen to play the piano, do you?” The church had been without an accompanist for some time, so you can imagine that my grandmother’s “yes” was met with an exuberant chorus of hallelujahs. Leaving her purse and Bible behind with my mother, then a little girl, she walked up front and played that very morning. And she did the same nearly every service afterwards for years until the week they moved.
By the time I came along in the late 70s, our family was full to bursting with music. Everyone sang each Sunday in church, and my Nonnie and Papaw often performed songs with my mother and aunt in a quartet someone dubbed “The Happy Lindleys.” For as long as I can remember, whether we were riding in the car or sitting together after dinner, we sang. Someone would start humming, and within a verse or two, we were harmonizing together. Granted, we weren’t the Von Trapps, but our melodies were genuine, tangible expressions of love and joy for one another, and for the God who made us a family. It was—and still remains—as much a part of our makeup as brown eyes, long fingers, and a penchant for peskiness.
Because of their influence, I learned not to discriminate when it came to music. Traditional hymns, folk songs, Southern gospel tunes, and spirituals all spoke God’s truth to me in ways I could grasp as a child. I understood Lamentations 3:22-24 because I’d absorbed “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” I rejoiced in the promise of Psalm 16:8 after learning “I Shall Not Be Moved.” And “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” fixed the truth of Matthew 10:29-31 deep in my heart. Because of music and a family that sang in both good times and bad, I came to know God with a Bible in one hand and a hymnal in the other. And it’s how we’ve all managed to preserve the song in our hearts now that we’re staring down the greatest challenge we’ve ever faced.
Last year, Papaw believed he’d lost his debit card after cleaning out his wallet. A handful of panicked moments later, he realized the slim piece of plastic was still there—just backwards and upside down. He simply hadn’t recognized it in its usual slot. At the time, we chalked it up to vision problems or fatigue, but several weeks later, the PIN number evaporated from his memory. As weeks became months, family members began to notice words and phrases he’d known all his life—screwdriver, double play, bookmark, Congress—were gone from his vocabulary, just beyond his mind’s reach. Multi-step tasks, such as making tea, became nearly impossible without help, and pantry items started showing up in the linen closet.
Individual instances were small, sometimes even comical, but they piled up like unwanted junk mail on the kitchen table. It became impossible for Nonnie and Papaw to ignore the fact there was a problem. Naturally, fear and worry filled their hearts, but when it threatened, they prayed and recited Isaiah 41:10: “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, surely I will help you. Surely I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.” Whatever was happening, they reasoned, had been purposed by God for their lives.
Anyone who has been diagnosed with an illness—physical or otherwise—will admit it’s unsettling. Many feel their bodies have betrayed them or become inescapable prisons. Papaw is soft-spoken and easily flustered, so as accessing words became increasingly difficult, he was left mute and shaking with frustration. Nonnie tried to soothe him, but nothing could banish the anxiety holding him captive.
One wearisome Thursday when nothing else would help, she pulled their worn maroon hymnbook from the piano bench and began to play. It was all she knew to do. For the next hour, songs like “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” “Rock of Ages,” “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” “I’d Rather Have Jesus,” and “Mansion Over the Hilltop” quietly rose from the burnished wood, filling their home with comforting and familiar sounds. Just like God—the One for whom they were written—the words and melodies of these songs hadn’t changed, even when everything else in their lives felt upended and scattered like the contents of a child’s toy box.
God was with them and always had been. They had just been too busy focusing on the darkness to look for the light.
As her fingers coaxed “He Hideth My Soul” from the instrument, she began to pray for strength, understanding, and, most of all, peace. In time, the words came to Papaw—sometimes easily, sometimes with great difficulty, and oftentimes imperfectly—but they came. She listened as he sweetly stumbled through the second verse, “A wonderful Savior is Jesus, my Lord. He taketh my burden away. He holdeth me up, and I shall not be moved. He giveth me strength as my day.” They both understood that, despite all outward appearances, God was with them and always had been. They had just been too busy focusing on the uncertain darkness to even begin looking for the light.
Oswald Chambers wrote in My Utmost for His Highest, “Sometimes God puts us through the experience and discipline of darkness to teach us to hear and obey Him. Songbirds are taught to sing in the dark, and God puts us into ‘the shadow of His hand’ until we learn to hear Him” (Isa. 49:2). Nonnie and Papaw understand this promise, difficult as it is proving to be. “Whenever our spiritual cups get dry,” she told me, “we just sing until they’re filled up again.”
Hebrews 12:10-11 tells us that God “disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” My grandparents’ spiritual strength, gained through previous hardships, makes worship possible now, and while they’re being even further refined by this trial, our entire family is reaping rewards as well. As we watch these two beloved souls fully lean on the Lord for strength and wisdom, we’re coming to recognize the truth of Job’s declaration, “Behold, how happy is the man whom God reproves, so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty” (Job 5:17).
Each morning, Nonnie and Papaw wake up uncertain of the challenges they’ll face, but they’re quick to point out to me, “Sissy, our heavenly Father knows, and that’s enough. We’re never alone in this.” Rather than worry, they pray for the measure of strength to help them until it’s time to lie down again—and thank God for the continuous supply. Like Job, they pose the rhetorical question, “Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?” (2:10). And their reply, as always, is a song.
Not once have my grandparents asked, “Why us?” without immediately following it with, “Why not us?” That’s because their hearts are in tune with God’s. They’ve spent so many years in His presence that they speak to Him in lyrical groanings (Rom. 8:26-27). I feel the same tendency growing in me and know the Lord is using Nonnie and Papaw to teach me the libretto of His love. To “put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise” (Ps. 40:3), the same almighty Composer is arranging both the coda of their lives and the second movement of mine.
The article was selected from In Touch magazine.
