Familiar hymns, Unfamiliar tongue

Takeji and Kyoko left a gift during their visit: a Japanese CD whose cover we could not read because the writing was all in Japanese. But when inserted into a CD player, I recognized instantly what they'd left us.

Many years ago as a boy I assembled a short-wave radio kit and for years I listened to the local AM radio station on it. One of the Sunday programs the station ran was called "The Great Hour of Music" (and from time to time there was the ever-present question: should it be called "The Great Hour of Music" or "The Hour of Great Music"? though they never changed the program name while I lived there). And though the hymn was not then in our Hymnal the program's anthem, the hymn "How Great Thou Art" has stuck in my mind ever since I first heard it on the radio.

Zoom forward many years and imagine: I insert a CD into a player, press the "play" key and hear... "How Great Thou Art" in (I reasonably assume) Japanese!

Wow.

What an incredible gift!

And what a message to those of us in this land who (likely wrongfully today) take Christianity as something that can be assumed (and ignored and deprecated), from one where it is still mostly alien.

What an incredible (and energizing) gift!