Keepers of the Light

Each Spring, our local church Keepers of the Light Men's Retreat journeys from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley to North Carolina's Outer Banks for three full days of soul inspiration. Our first stop along the Carolina Coastline is always at the Chicamacomico Lifesaving Station Historical Site in Rodanthe. Indescribable!

On one of the walls in the old boat house, the words of a beloved hymn of the church are wood-burned on an old cedar shingle. The words are from the 1871 hymn by Philip P. Bliss titled Let the Lower Lights Be Burning. With 75 to 100 men and boys crammed in the old boat house, the inspiration truly begins when through tear-lined eyes, we fill the rafters with the sacred singing of these old lifesaving lyrics:

Brightly beams our Father’s mercy from His lighthouse evermore,
But to us He gives the keeping of the lights along the shore.

Let the lower lights be burning! Send a gleam across the wave!
For to us He gives the keeping of the lights along the shore.
[or Some poor struggling, sinking sailor you may rescue, you may save.

Dark the night of sin has settled, loud the angry billows roar;
Eager eyes are watching, longing, for the lights, along the shore.

Let the lower lights be burning! Send a gleam across the wave!
Eager eyes are watching, longing, for the lights, along the shore.

Trim your feeble lamp, my brother, some poor sailor tempest tossed,
Trying now to make the harbor, in the darkness may be lost.

Let the lower lights be burning! Send a gleam across the wave!
Trying now to make the harbor, some poor sailor may be lost.

IF MY PEOPLE... WILL? I WILL! God's Promise in 2 Chron. 7:14.
Grateful