He Keeps Me Singing

It was at a low point in his life. A shock!

Born in North Carolina in February 1884, Luther Bridgers had spent a life dedicated to ministry, pastoring churches, and serving as an evangelist and missionary to Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Russia.

But nothing prepared him for the tragedy that struck his family in 1910 when his wife and three sons were killed in a fire. He received the news after a successful, two-week crusade during which many lives had been touched. But the news he received that night stretched his faith in ways he could not have anticipated.

As happened so often in his life, he wrote a song that lifted his spirits. The song was “He Keeps Me Singing.”

In spite of “life’s ebb and flow,” he felt his heart filled with a melody whispered by Jesus: “Fear not, I am with thee, peace, be still.” He could look back and see how his life had been “wrecked by sin and strife.” How “discord filled my heart with pain.” But that discord had been replaced with harmony as “Jesus swept across the broken strings, stirred the slumbering chords again.”

He could “shout and sing,” as he looked on Jesus’ smiling face and rested beneath “His sheltering wing” and “feasting on the riches of His grace.” Life’s journey could bring him through “trails and deep waters” and the path could seem “rough and steep.” Yet He knew that he could see Jesus’ “footprints all the way.” And he knew that He was coming back, and that he would “reign with Him on high.”

How wonderful it was just to sing His name: “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sweetest Name I know, fills my every longing, keeps me singing as I go.”

Make sure that Jesus is with you, every step of your way!