"Unless your grace had called me and taught my opening mind, the world would have enthralled me."

Hymn: “My Lord, I Did Not Choose You” - Josiah Conder (1789-1850)

Various Tunes - Commonly WHITFIELD

This may be a hymn text you have never sung. It doesn't appear in many hymnals, probably because of its 'election' theme. I admit that I have not sung it too frequently over the years, but when I have, THIS is the hymn-line that catches my attention.

First, it reminds me that the amazing grace of Christ called me into and taught me about the kingdom. The luring power of God’s grace may have been like the siren’s song – only this was a positive melody that pulled me not into dangerous waters or a swirling eddy, but rather into the safest of all waters.

I sincerely hope that I have an ever-more-open mind… that my perspective on all things spiritual and corporeal – even cultural – is constantly expanding. I attribute that ever-widening of my horizons to my deeper understanding of grace during my pilgrimage of faith. When I sing this hymn-line, I picture that opening of Monty Python’s Flying Circus where the top of the man’s head is flipped open and stuff goes pouring in. I realize we have to filter our thinking and guard our mind, but it doesn’t have to be slammed shut, locked tight against all other ways of thinking, doing, and living.

Were it not for grace, the world would have lured me with its siren song, and mine might have been an entirely different path than it has turned out to be. I might well have been dashed upon the rocks, spinning in an eddy like I found myself one summer afternoon when thrown from a raft into “the widow maker” on the Arkansas River in Colorado.

Do you remember the story of Pinocchio? At least you might recall the 1940 Disney film. Most of us think of the growing-nosed-liar of a wooden marionette, but the scenes that flash through my mind while singing today’s hymn-line is when Pinocchio decides he is grown up enough to head out on his own, out from under his creator Geppetto’s constant care. He finds himself much like the Prodigal Son; instead of a pig-pen, Pinocchio and his friends go to Pleasure Island where they gamble, smoke and get drunk – obviously not good church kids! A curse actually turns them into jackasses!

This fairy tale has a lot of biblical implications including characters being swallowed and coughed-up by a whale. It also has the re-uniting of the father-figure with his wayward whittling project of a boy. In the end, Pinocchio dies and is brought back to life, being reborn as a human after all – no longer lumbering his way through life.

But I digress. The world outside Geppetto’s workshop and the sin he discovered on Pleasure Island – these enthralled him. With wide-eyed wonder, he wanted to try it all.

We’re all familiar with the phrase: “There but by the grace of God go I” (attributed to 16^th Century preacher/martyr John Bradford).  That pretty much sums up this hymn-line, doesn’t it?

Creator of who I am: Continue to call me by your grace to be open-minded, but don’t let me be so enthralled by my bedazzled surroundings to lose sight of the One who made me and who severed the strings so I could discover who I would be and who I have become. Amen.

Listen to a Setting of This Hymn