Music, like smells, can invoke memories and bring you back to a different place and time. I want to talk (type?) specifically about hymns that do that.
“Called to Serve†is an obvious one for mission memories, but for me, it brings me back to my pre-mission days. On Sunday evenings, my BYU ward (as seems to be tradition in all BYU wards) would gather in the apartment building lobby for ward prayer (consisting of a hymn, scripture, and prayer). It was a vaguely enjoyable 15 minutes. If I remember correctly, almost half the time the hymn “Called to Serve†would be selected.
I imagine this is because most people know this song and can sing it without a hymnbook, plus it’s kind of a peppy, fun song. So when we sing it in church now, I remember heading downstairs with my roommates, finding a spot along the wall or on the floor, looking at the cute guys and seeing who was with who (“They’re together?! No way!â€), and enjoying a few minutes of communal worship.
The song that brings me back to my mission is “God Be With You Till We Meet Againâ€. Anytime we sing this in church, I’m instantly transported to the past. I have two specific memories with this hymn. The first one is from my time in the MTC. On our last night together before the nine of us shipped off to four different missions, we stood outside in the early summer darkness, in those very few minutes we had before having to be in our dorm rooms, saying our final goodbyes. We had so much fun in that district and it was painful to be moving on. As we cried (even the elders), we sang “God Be With You Till We Meet Again†together. Fast forward a year and a half later, and we get to my second memory with the hymn. On my last night in the mission, we called in – as we did every night – to our district leader to tell him we were in. He and his companion got on the speakerphone and sang “God Be With You Till We Meet Again†to me in English and then in Spanish. Thus, that hymn will forever remind me of my mission.
Finally, the hymn “I’ll Go Where You Want Me To Go†reminds me of ward and stake splits. The town I grew up in was and still is one of those towns with new subdivisions always going in – whole new neighborhoods popping up almost overnight in what used to be hay fields (I could swear this one subdivision really did go in overnight, and came up with a theory of alien invasion of Earth via suburbia). Thus, every couple of years, our ward would be bursting at the seams, and a ward split would inevitably occur. As a teenager, I was devastated by a couple of the splits, as many friends would no longer be in my same ward. I would emerge from the multi-ward meetings they’d hold – where they would put up the map and announce the new ward boundaries – sobbing about the injustice and tragedy of the cruel split, and how the new people were snobs and there was no way I could ever be friends with them. (Ah, the melodrama of a teenager.) Of course, two years later, at the next split, those same “snobs†were my best friends and I was again devastated as they were split away. In the later splits, the stake seemed to have discovered that “I’ll Go Where You Want Me To Go†is the perfect hymn when a ward or stake is splitting. Even through my tears, it made me smile because, really, it was the perfect choice for a closing hymn.
What hymns bring you back to a different place and time?