The Lullaby on the Back Porch

Margaret Ellison was seventy-three when she told me about the night she almost gave up. It was August 1968 in rural Kentucky, three weeks after her husband Carl had been buried, and the silence of the farmhouse pressed against her like a weight she could not lift. She sat on the back porch in Carl's rocking chair, too exhausted to cry, too hollow to pray.

Then she heard her neighbor, Doris Freeman, singing.

Doris was hanging laundry on the line next door — at nine o'clock at night, because that was Doris — and she was singing "It Is Well with My Soul" in a voice that was not particularly beautiful but was utterly unashamed. She did not know Margaret was listening. She was not performing. She was simply singing the way a person sings when joy lives somewhere deeper than circumstance.

Margaret told me that something broke open in her chest. Not the grief — that stayed. But the loneliness cracked, because someone nearby was singing, and the night was not as empty as she had believed.

Zephaniah 3:17 tells us that the Lord your God is in your midst. He is not distant. He is not silent. He is the Mighty One who saves, and then — astonishingly — He rejoices over you with loud singing. Not because your life is fixed. Not because the grief is gone. But because He is near, and His song is strong enough to quiet your soul in the darkness.