Be Not Afraid

“Be not afraid. I go before you always.”

I rose before the sun to the chorus of this hymnal playing in my thoughts on the morning following the request to choose songs for my dad’s funeral. In its repetition, there was a familiarity to the repeated verse, though nothing I could think that gave me reason to know it.

“Be not afraid. I go before you always,” it continued.

I didn’t want to forget the line.  I made myself keep saying it until I could search the internet exactly as I was hearing it.   It repeated.

In my curious pursuit, my heart was instantly touched at what the search revealed first. What God must have tucked away in my heart.  “A traditional Catholic hymnal.”   We had been thinking of songs to play, of course.  It had been requested of us.  We had been thinking of many of our songs.  We just couldn’t think of Dad’s.

I was quick to tell Mom my discovery, who assured me Dad loved that song.  He did?  He knew that song? She affirmed they both did.

“You shall see the face of God and live.”

Our family’s legacy of faith began with Dad in the Catholic Church.  As early as an altar boy, he had felt a duty of protection.  A duty that never left him.  The lyrics to this hymnal speaks of our Father in heaven, but what I know to be true is that it speaks of my father on earth.  God has revealed Himself to us in a collage of ways.

I’m confident it was in my father.

I hear him.

Be not afraid.

I go before you.

Always.

Isaiah 43