Michael W. Smith - Hymn For Communion Lyrics

Video

Michael W. Smith: Hymn for Communion

Meaning & Inspiration

My hands have grown stiff over the decades, the kind of gnarled timber that doesn't grip a coffee mug quite like it used to. Sometimes, when the house settles at night and the silence gets loud enough to hear my own pulse, I sit and wonder if the creeds I’ve memorized still hold the weight they did when I was thirty. Michael W. Smith’s new arrangement brings me back to that table, not as an abstract concept, but as a place to land when the knees are weak.

"The breaking for your healing / The bleeding sets you free."

It is a difficult, jagged thing to hold. We spend so much of our lives trying to keep things whole—our marriages, our reputations, our own frail sanity. We curate our lives to look sturdy. But these lines insist on the inverse: that the fracture is where the light actually gets in. I’ve sat in enough hospital waiting rooms and funeral parlors to know that the breaking usually feels like an ending, not a remedy. Yet, Scripture whispers something else entirely in Isaiah 53, pointing to the One who was wounded for our transgressions. It’s not a comforting thought in the way a soft blanket is comforting; it’s a terrifyingly raw exchange. Can the breaking of a body—His or ours—truly be the foundation of freedom? I suspect that’s a question you only start to answer after you’ve lost enough to realize you never really owned anything anyway.

Then there is the invitation: "Come to the table / Pull up a chair / The lost and the lonely / Are all welcome there."

When you’re young, you imagine this table as a grand, polished affair. You think you’ve got to straighten your collar before you sit down. But as the years peel away the vanity, you realize the invitation is for the "weak and afraid." It’s for the people who have nothing to offer but their exhaustion. I’ve reached a point where I don’t have much left to trade. My best works are just dust. Standing at the rail, feeling the bread crumble, I realize the "lofty and the lowly" aren't being told to reach for the ceiling. We are just being told to eat.

It hits me differently now than it did twenty years ago. Back then, it felt like an obligation, a box to check on a Sunday morning. Now, it feels like a life-raft. I don’t know if I have the theology quite right, and I don't know why some get healed and some just get broken, but I know the hunger doesn't go away. Smith’s words hang in the air like dust motes in a shaft of afternoon light, suggesting that "heaven’s here and now." Maybe that’s the hardest part—believing that the Presence isn't something we’re waiting to inherit, but something we’re sitting in, right in the middle of our mess, right while the strength is flickering out.

It’s not a tidy answer. My hands are still tired. The world is still spinning with more sorrow than I can carry. But I’ll keep pulling up the chair.