Encouragement

Encouragement

Then I heard again what sounded like the shout of a huge crowd, or the roar of mighty ocean waves, or the crash of loud thunder: “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.”

Revelation 19:6

My eleven-year-old son was seated next to me in our van when the tape we were listening to began to play the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. As Jordan took off his seat belt and tried to stand up, we laughed! Everyone knows that you stand when you hear the “Hallelujah Chorus,” right? But not everyone knows of Handel’s discouragement leading up to that composition.

George Frederic Handel’s father was a barber who was determined that his son would become a lawyer. In spite of the fact that Handel loved music as a child, his father forbade him to take lessons. That changed when a duke who heard nine-year-old Handel play the organ strongly encouraged the father to give the boy formal music training.

Although he was enormously gifted as an organist and composer, Handel didn’t have an easy existence. He fell in and out of favor with changing monarchs, dealt with unpredictable audiences, and was so deeply in debt that he thought he might end up in prison. Terribly discouraged, Handel was ready to retire from public life when he received a libretto taken entirely from the Bible. At the same time, he was given a commission from a Dublin charity to compose a work for a benefit performance.

Handel began composing, and after twenty-four days he completed 260 pages of a manuscript titled Messiah. One writer commented that the music and message of Messiah “has probably done more to convince thousands of mankind that there is a God . . . than all the theological works ever written.”^a

Just because we’re discouraged doesn’t mean God can’t use us!

God who sees the whole picture,

It’s easy for us to give up and lose heart when we’re discouraged. It’s easy for our children to want to give up. Help us run to you and remember that many people who have contributed to expanding your Kingdom were at some point discouraged. Amen.