Playing the organ at church is tricky these days. I wonder if my fingers–stiff, weak, and lacking in sensation–are going to strike the right keys at the right time. I wonder if my foot will get the message when my left leg tries to pick it up to place it on a different foot pedal. I wonder if my right leg, the one hitched to the foot on the volume pedal, will suddenly jerk and abruptly amplify the music to a mortifying crescendo in the middle of a quiet hymn.

I worry that my leg muscles, stressed from their unnatural position as I perch on the bench, will suddenly spasm–will I be able to keep from crying out? Will the music stop mid-song as I hobble around trying to ease the pain and find a back way out?

Will my eyes play mean tricks again and twist the notes on the staff into jumbled wreckage while I frantically try to find my way through the maze by tenuous memory? Will a black hole open up in my brain and I won’t remember what verse we’re on–stop playing at the end of the third verse out of four, or continue on when everyone else has come to Amen?

The days of singing along as I play are over, of course. I daren’t take the chance of allowing two things to go on at once. I lip-synch sometimes, because I can’t help it. The music draws the lyrics out of my heart. But I must focus, not get side-tracked by the message that’s part of the music. Joy takes a back seat to concentration.

Last Sunday morning, as the congregation sang an old familiar hymn, the words written by Edward Mote in 1834, a phrase struck a chord somewhere deep inside me: “sinking sand”. If someone had looked up at me from the pews, he would have seen a slight smile on my lips and most likely thought I was being blessed. No, not yet. It was a rueful smile as it occurred to me how apt that expression, sinking sand, has become in my life.

Sinking sand. How I know that feeling as my tired, wobbly legs struggle through the day. That’s just what it feels like, walking in sinking sand. Never knowing if the earth will give way underneath me and I’ll struggle, arms flailing, to remain upright. Lurching off one way then another like an odd tee-totaling drunk. Sinking sand; that is my life these days.

Through the rest of the service, my mind held onto the analogy and spread it further over my life like sticky jam. Everything I thought firm and solid in life is gradually turning to sinking sand, slowing my life journey to a hesitant crawl, ever wary lest the sand give way beneath me. My physical and mental health, my relationships, my financial future. All sinking sand.

Tears threatened as little snatches of lyrics from the hymn brought more similarities: “I dare not trust the sweetest frame...” So true. Even the people dearest to my heart can’t be fully trusted, being the imperfect humans that they (we) are. My husband doesn’t understand. My kids can’t handle it. If I lean too hard on any relationship, my neediness will be more weight than any friend could be expected to bear, and we’ll collapse...like sinking sand.

“Darkness...the whelming flood....when all around my soul gives way.” All these sound bites from the hymn poked at sore spots in my heart. I thought I was on solid ground, but I am on sinking sand these days, every step I take.

Shamelessly blocking out the pastor’s sermon, I read and re-read the words of the hymn, hungry for the hope I knew must be there, moving past the poor-me portions and finally tracing my fingertips across the promise in the phrases that follow: “His unchanging grace...my anchor holds...He then is all my Hope and Stay...” I pressed my fingers onto the printed chorus, turning with the songwriter from the sinking sand and looking upward.

Over and over the rest of the day, and on into this week, I catch myself singing the words of that chorus, and I clutch tightly the truth that God is showing me through the old hymn. I cling to the unchanging hand of One who lifts me from the miry clay, Who is the firm foundation of my soul, Who guides me over uneven terrain and yes, even through quicksand. With deep settled joy I sing once again the last line of the chorus:

On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand!