Amazing Grace.
We’ve known the tune all our lives.
The lyrics are memorized.
Thousands of renditions have been made of this song.
In recent years, its meaning has become more poignant to me than ever before.
But this beloved song, hundreds of years old, takes on a fresh new beauty when I hear it streaming from the school that houses rescued girls, from the staff that dedicates their lives to fleshing it out.
Its words ring even more true in a language not my own, from the lips of those who know at the very deepest level what those words mean.
This school, such a representative of God’s grace where the lost are found and the “blind” come to see.
In the Khmer language, there are different inflections and tones. Different syllables and letters, foreign to our Western ears. But when this song plays, when these people sing, the language becomes universal. The unison of hearts breaking into the harmony of a chorus.
Grace is for all of us. And when we experience it firsthand as these precious people have, when we sing it with our hearts and not just our voices, we respond in a language we all can understand.
Love.
And suddenly its no mystery why this familiar hymn in this unfamiliar tongue has never been more beautiful…
