I’ve known the tune of the hymn “Let All Things Now Living” longer than I’ve known the actual hymn. The tune comes from a Welsh folk song called “The Ash Grove” and my mother used to love to play it on the piano when I was growing up. I learned of the hymn somewhere along the line but did not start loving it until I acquired Michael Card’s CD “Starkindler” in 2002 or 2003. When my grandfather was in the hospital in December 2005, a music therapist came in and offered to play the song. I sang the hymn while he accompanied me on guitar. I sang it again three months later during the week I spent in Washington with my mom before I had to say my final good-byes. (He died three weeks later.) My aunt and I sang the hymn at my grandfather’s interment of ashes while Jon and my evil twin brother Sean played the guitar. Almost a year and a half later, I was standing in Church #3 in Montana singing it while my mom and her siblings were placing the headstone on my grandfather’s grave.

Despite my history with the hymn, I love it and it’s a beautiful one for spring though we’re still in Lent at the moment. I love how it describes how all of nature answers to the authority of the Lord and how all things are to praise Him. There’s also the sheer beauty of the tune. (The Welsh rock in terms of hymn and folk tunes.)

Here are the lyrics:

Let all things now living a song of thanksgiving
To God the creator triumphantly raise.
Who fashioned and made us, protected and stayed us,
Who still guides us on to the end of our days.
God’s banners are o’er us, His light goes before us,
A pillar of fire shining forth in the night.
Till shadows have vanished and darkness is banished
As forward we travel from light into light.

His law he enforces, the stars in their courses
And sun in its orbit obediently shine;
The hills and the mountains, the rivers and fountains,
The deeps of the ocean proclaim him divine.
We too should be voicing our love and rejoicing;
With glad adoration a Song let us raise
Till all things now living unite in thanksgiving:
“To God in the highest, Hosanna and praise!”

Here’s the Michael Card arrangement with Darwin Hobb’s rich African-American bass singing part of it as well.