Christ My Song - 813
One place I have in heaven above - The hidden path
(Frances Bevan/Johannes Thomas Rüegg)
The hidden path.
"There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen." (Job 28,7)
1. One place I have in heaven above,
the glory of his throne –
on this dark earth, whence he is gone,
I have one place alone,
and if his rest in heaven I know,
I joy to find his path below. (PDF - Midi)
2. We meet to own that place alone
around the broken bread –
the dead whose life is hid with Christ
remembering Jesus dead.
For us has set the earthly light,
above, the glory; here, the night.
3. And dear as is his place on high,
his footsteps are below,
where he has gone through scorn and wrong,
there also would I go.
Lord, where thou diedst I would die,
for where thou livest, there am I.
4. One lonely place across the waste,
the lowly path of shame;
I would adore thy wondrous grace
that I should tread the same.
The Stranger and the Alien, thou –
and I the stranger, alien, now.
5. The Cross a mighty barrier stands
between the world and me –
not yielding with reluctant hands,
but glorying to be free,
from that which now is dung and dross,
beside thy Glory, and thy Cross.
6. I see thee there amidst the light,
the Father's blessed Son;
I know that I in thee am there,
that light and love mine own.
What has this barren world to give,
if there in thy deep joy I live?
7. Sent hither from that glorious Home,
as thou wert sent before,
of that great love from whence I come
to witness evermore,
for this would I count all things loss,
thy joy, thy glory, and thy Cross.
T. P.
Frances Bevan, Hymns of Ter Steegen and others 2, 1899, 50-51.