“One day, I went to see a beautiful, elderly woman. She had cancer and she was in her last days, at the hospice. I had seen her many times before, and I knew that it had been hard for her, dealing with the diagnosis and having to leave her beloved husband and her children and grandchildren, whom she adored. But that day I walked in, and there she was, sitting on a sunny verandah. She was wearing a white gown and she had a halo of white hair.

“She turned and smiled at me, and she said, ‘Jill! It’s all right!’ Then she read Zephaniah 3:17-20, ‘The Lord your God is with you, he is might to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing…he will bring you home.’

“And then she said to me, ‘Just imagine, Jill! God is singing! Can you hear him singing?!’ I’ll never forget it. We stopped and imagined God singing. Then we talked about the way he quiets us with his love. It’s stayed with me for more than a decade.

“I went to the hospice thinking that I was giving her a pastoral visit, and she taught me more about God in that time than I’d known before. She died not long after that. But even today, that verse makes me smile. It reminds me that not everything is as bleak as it sometimes feels.

The Gospel is full of hope and joy. God delights over us, and he rejoices over us with singing … and he will bring us home.”

Glenn’s story is part of Eternity’s Faith Stories series, compiled by Naomi Reed. Click here for more Faith Stories.