A Hymn Written Among the Graves

In 1637, the Saxon town of Eilenburg was drowning. The Thirty Years' War had driven desperate refugees behind its walls, and then plague arrived. Bodies filled the streets faster than anyone could bury them. Pastor Martin Rinkart, the only remaining clergyman in the city, performed as many as fifty funerals in a single day — over four thousand that year alone. Among the dead was his own wife.

The cords of death were no metaphor for Rinkart. They were the ropes lowering coffins into mass graves outside his church door. He knew the anguish the psalmist described — distress, sorrow, the grave pressing close on every side.

Yet from that valley of shadow, Rinkart did something astonishing. He wrote not a dirge but a thanksgiving hymn: "Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices, who wondrous things has done, in whom this world rejoices."

The psalmist asks, "What shall I return to the Lord for all His goodness to me?" Rinkart answered the same way — he lifted the cup of salvation. He called on the name of the Lord not in spite of his suffering but straight through its center. He fulfilled his vows in the presence of all God's people, standing among the grieving, singing praise to the Almighty.