The Music & the Spoken Word broadcast airs live via TV, radio, and internet stream on Sunday at 9:30 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time. For information on other airtimes, visit “Airing Schedules” at musicandthespokenword.org.
Music
Conductor: Ryan Murphy
Organist: Richard Elliott
Announcer: Lloyd Newell
“Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven”
Music: Ryan Murphy
Lyrics: Henry F. Lyte
“My Shepherd Will Supply My Need”1
American folk hymn
Lyrics: Psalm 23; paraphrased by Isaac Watts
Arrangement: Mack Wilberg
“Improvisation on ‘How Firm a Foundation’” (Organ solo)
Music: J. Ellis; setting by Richard Elliott
“The Battle of Jericho”2
Spiritual
Arrangement: Moses Hogan
“Climb Ev’ry Mountain”3 from The Sound of Music
Music: Richard Rodgers
Lyrics: Oscar Hammerstein II
Arrangement: Arthur Harris
“Come, Labor On”
Music: T. Tertius Noble
Lyrics: Jane L. Bothwick
Arrangement: Ryan Murphy
- On the CD Consider the Lilies and in the CD set Encore Collection.
- On the CD Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing and in the CD set Bravo! The #1 Albums.
- On the CD America's Choir and in the CD set Anniversary Collection.
The Spoken Word
"Little by Little"
A French proverb says that “little by little, the bird builds its nest.”
In the 1830s, the noted writer Thomas Carlyle learned this truth in a dramatic way. He had embarked on a multiyear effort to write a massive literary work on the French Revolution. Upon finishing the first volume, he gave the manuscript to his friend John Stuart Mill to read. Mill’s servant, however, mistaking the pages for trash, used the manuscript to start a fire. When Carlyle learned of this blunder, he was devastated. Years of hard work had literally gone up in flames! How would he ever rewrite it?
Legend has it that one day, Carlyle saw a mason building a wall, carefully laying one brick at a time. Carlyle took new courage. He could rewrite his book, the same way he wrote it the first time—one page at a time.
Like Thomas Carlyle’s book, life is a monumental, long-term work. Just about everything good in life is built little by little, brick by brick—with patience and persistence. Success, happiness, contentment, and strong relationships don’t happen overnight. They take time: time to make things right, time to mend and heal, time to learn and improve.
It’s comforting to note that the great God of Heaven is a God of patience and longsuffering. If He can be patient with us, we would do well to be patient with ourselves.
So we stay with it, day after day, and do our best to carry on. Whether it’s writing a book, planting a garden, overcoming a weakness, or building a friendship, we keep at it. Albert Einstein said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Persistence and patience will not make problems go away, but as we’ve all witnessed and experienced, they can give us the power and the hope to face our problems.
Perhaps we could all take a lesson from Thomas Carlyle, from the bricklayer, and from the bird, all of whom accomplished great things “little by little.”
- See Meredith Hindley, “The Voracious Pen of Thomas Carlyle,” Humanities, Mar.-Apr. 2009, neh.gov/humanities/2009/marchapril/the-voracious-pen-thomas-carlyle.
- See Clyde E. Nichols, Lift Up Your Eyes (2011), 105.
- In Richard A. Singer Jr., Your Daily Walk with the Great Minds: Wisdom and Enlightenment of the Past and Present (2006), 4.