A world of trouble going on, and everybody’s talking about it. I had emergency retinal reattachment surgery last Friday, and I’m stuck at home this week getting over it. Helplessly watching the mess of a world.

A dear friend, Miss Jeanie, the hospice nurse who sat with my Dad until he died and me until they took his body, just went through surgery. It went well. But I owe her for being with me on that terrible day, forever. I’m sending her all the gospel songs I have on CDs to listen to. She loves that music. But I have been listening back through those songs. This one, which I first heard done by Flatt and Scruggs, spoke to me.

When you’re stuck on the sidelines of life, as Reinhold Niebuhr put it, you deal with a peculiar kind of powerlessness. You need something to hold onto. I love this song. Someone in this world is always in trouble. Occasionally, the whole world manages to get ourselves in the crapper of folly simultaneously.

I’ve always felt deeply that the best of the old gospel songs have a universality about them. I know sometimes that it must feel to those outside our faith tradition that the tightly puckered suburban megachurch evangelicals always want to either sell you something or trick you into joining. More often than not, that’s right. But there’s a world under the old songs, back before contemporary Christian music became an industry. Many of the old songs were written to hearts of desperation, living in hard worlds and needing just a scrap of hope while they hung on by their fingernails.

I learned as a sububan pastor that poor people didn’t have exclusive consignment to desperation. When you drive past a mcmansion, you never know what pain and lostness might be in those walls. So, I sing gospel songs for everyone. They’re about hope. Jesus, who generates love and tenderness in about any person who can get past all the crusts that institutional religion manages to put in your way, was, according to the gospels, keenly attuned to suffering people.

There’s a lot going on, as I said, But a lot of folks, like me today, are just where we are, doing what we have to do. So I send this song out for whoever might find yourself by a hospital bedside, or in one, or stuck somewhere you don’t want to be and can’t do anything about it. Whoever needs this old song today, I put it here for you.

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10 Troublesome Waters, by Gary Allison Furr