We live in times of great shaking and tremendous uncertainty, times in which it is not hard to wonder, “What is coming next?” In times like this it is all the more important to put all our trust—not some, but all—in the Lord. He alone is our Rock, our refuge, our helper, our Redeemer. To Him alone do we cry, and He alone is our God.
Coming to faith in 1971 as a Jewish teenager with no prior church background, singing the hymns was a completely new experience for me. What did the words even mean? And why so much talk about blood?
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The first time I attended a church service was in August 1971 with the intent of pulling my friends out. They were my fellow band members and druggies, and I didn’t like the change I was seeing in their lives.
But the people were tremendously loving to me, despite my appearance and attitude, and as I left the service, one of the men said to me, “No matter how close the devil is to you, God is even closer.”
I was impressed with his zeal and energy—after all, I was 16 and he was in his 60s—but what was he trying to tell me? I was clueless.
Once I came to faith, I began to understand the significance of many of the words we would sing, and they began to make sense to me. (I do recall, though, that I led a friend to the Lord in high school, and for the life of him, he could not figure out why we were always singing about the “cavalry,” which he mistook for the word “Calvary.” Still, he loved the songs.)
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Abby Trivett 
Stephen Strang