Heaven Before Me

In the late summer of 1741, George Frideric Handel shut himself inside his home at 25 Brook Street in London and began to compose. For roughly twenty-four days, he worked with a ferocity that alarmed his servants. He barely ate. He rarely left his writing desk. Page after page of manuscript piled up as the oratorio that would become Messiah poured out of him.

When his servant entered the room after Handel had finished composing the Hallelujah Chorus, he found the composer sitting with tears streaming down his face. Handel looked up and said, "I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself."

Something had broken through. A fifty-six-year-old German-born composer, sitting alone in a London townhouse with ink-stained fingers and an untouched meal tray, had glimpsed glory. The music he set to paper that day would echo the very words of Revelation 19:6 — "Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth" — and it has never stopped being sung in the nearly three centuries since.

What Handel experienced in that room is what worship was always meant to be: not performance, not routine, but an encounter with the living God so overwhelming that it leaves you weeping and whispering, "I saw Heaven." The Almighty does not wait for grand cathedrals or perfect conditions. Sometimes He meets us at a cluttered desk, in the middle of ordinary work, and opens the curtain just enough to take our breath away.