Everything I needed to know for life I learned in fifth grade.
Not really. But, it sure seems like it. When I reflect back on memories that stand out or tell stories to my kids that I think are important about my youth, it seems like they all start with “When I was in fifth grade. . .”
Three pivotal things happened that year—the glorious year of being ten years old. The first thing is that I moved from the ‘Lower Grade’ classroom to the ‘Upper Grade’ classroom in the two-room country gradeschool I attended, and sat at the feet of an incredible teacher named Larry Rude. It was a terrible mis-naming of an individual. Mr. Rude was as far from being rude as the east is from the west. He had kind eyes, a quick, sincere smile and I was his favorite student. Never mind that I learned later that a few of my siblings and friends thought they were his favorite student, too. What a gift for a teacher to be able to convey that type of widespread fondness for his class.
He was kind but he was strict—the two qualities of a teacher that, when balanced well, results in lots of education being given and received. I had homework almost every night but I went at it with the zeal of a loyal and admiring soldier. I would have crawled through fire for him. It was in fifth grade that the patriotic fire in my heart started to burn when he assigned a history project that thrust me deep into the emotions of the Civil War. I remember grasping and being sobered by the fact that this wasn’t a war between two countries—but a war between citizens of one country; and grippingly, sometimes between father and son, and brother and brother.
The second pivotal thing that happened that year was that I graduated from walking behind the tobacco planter and filling the holes that the planters had missed, to sitting on the tobacco planter and feeding the little tobacco starts into the rotating, duck-bill-looking grabber thingies that effortlessly stuck the plant in the ground and even gave it a shot of water, to boot. Riding on that machine in the back of Lloyd Juve’s tractor had me feeling like I could handle anything.
The third pivotal thing is something that I can’t say happened all at once in fifth grade but I do believe this is where it started—a growing ability and desire to comprehend the words of the hymns that I had been memorizing. I had been learning hymns since I was in the womb, and due to my mom’s nighttime prayer and hymn-singing regimen, I knew many hymns before I attended school. That number was robustly augmented through a rigorous study of hymns and memorization schedule in the Christian Day School I attended. But for years it was simply rote learning. I had become pretty adept at committing the poetic lines to memory. It’s kind of an ‘art.’
And then, all of a sudden, I started thinking about the words, not just the syllables and metre, and I began to realize that packed inside my heart was a veritable arsenal of some of the most beautiful language I would ever come to know.
As an enlightened upper-grader, I won’t soon forget running across the words of this verse of ‘O Sacred Head, Now Wounded’ and feeling like I had been stopped in my tracks. In ten short, smoothly connected, understandable words, the author had managed to convey the immensity of Christ’s sacrifice for me through the idea that the English language was simply not equipped to give my Savior proper thanks. Wow, I thought, as I read that line over and over. The depth of Christ’s love simply could not be described any better by a human.
I have many favorite hymns and struggle to list them in order of priority because of how much I like them all. I also have favorite verses–not always the first verse of a hymn, but sometimes a verse tucked inside or at the very end. But, additionally, I have favorite lines of hymns. Today, if I were to be asked, ‘What is your favorite line of a hymn?’ I would answer, with conviction, “What language shall I borrow to thank Thee, dearest Friend?”
Of all the cards I’ve designed so far, this one has taken the longest. I wanted it to be special. I worked on this for a week, scrapping whole design after whole design before settling on this. I wanted the first line of this verse to leap off a clean page and the font to appear somewhat primary to reflect the simple language, understood by a fifth grader. The small purple flowers convey the Christian Church’s color reserved for the Passion of Christ. And the subtle white cloth in the background reminds the reader that, while Christ languished on a cross, bearing the guilt and sins of the entire human race, ‘Sunday was comin.’
And his white robes would be flowin’.
“What language shall I borrow to thank Thee, dearest Friend,
For this, Thy dying sorrow, thy pity without end?
O make me Thine forever! And should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never, outlive my love for Thee.”
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