New Year’s Day, 12:30 p.m. A text from my sister in Culver City, Calif., asked if we were excited about the Rose Bowl. I did a double take. All my focus on New Year’s Eve events and New Year’s Day meals had shifted my attention from football to more mundane interests, but I wasn’t about to let her know. For many years, she and her husband attended Rose Bowl parades and Rose Bowl games. He had been so loyal to UCLA that “Bruins Fan” was part of the epitaph on his gravestone.
Are we excited? Absolutely! I replied … and then scrambled to figure out how to watch the game. With help from my daughter, I managed to sign in, and with just a few minutes to spare I connected to the most wonderful football experience I can remember.
No matter what the team rankings might say, I wasn’t taking an IU victory for granted. Way back in the day, I attended college in Alabama, and I knew the intensity of the football culture there and everywhere in the Deep South. I was actually rather nervous during the first quarter.
But somewhere in the game commentary, a different memory was triggered, when one announcer referred to the Crimson Tide. I thought about those music students I knew back in the day, and the stories they told about their churches back home. On Sundays after an Alabama game — a home game? an Alabama victory? — their churches would sing the hymn “Grace Greater than Our Sin.” One of its familiar lines says “Look, there is flowing a crimson tide …” Yes, they really made a point to sing that hymn to recognize and support their team.
While I was wondering if they sang the original lyrics or if they actually sang “Look, there is rolling a crimson tide” (because “Roll, Tide!”), I started to consider what we should sing to recognize our team. During halftime and any lulls in the second half action, I engaged in the quest to find an appropriate song, using terms like “whose your” or “who’s yours?” and other variants. No success.
Then I checked combinations of “eye and you” and finally “I and you.” And bingo, voilá, ta-dah, there it was — a favorite hymn from long ago: “So Send I You.” The story of the hymn is rather touching. A young Canadian woman had wanted to become a missionary, but couldn’t for health reasons. The only teaching jobs she could find were far away, and the one she took was in a mining camp 1,400 miles from home. Feeling isolated, lonely and unappreciated, she wrote a song that has spoken to generations of people living and working in various kinds of religious, social service and other nonprofit ministries.
Our minister of music graciously included it in Sunday’s song rotation. While the congregation sang, I played the piano, not listening to the words very much. Then, as I checked the livestream afterwards, I discovered the lyrics they sang were not exactly the ones I remembered — after all, the song has many verses. I hadn’t remembered the line that said “So send I you, my victory to win.” Perfect!
Our pastor reminded us that after observing the robust, practically obnoxious enthusiasm of football fans from the SEC, it’s okay if we are now the ones floating on air, even gloating on the ground, able to say, “Yeah, in Indiana we play football too.” Smirk. So now, I’m counting on singing this great hymn for a couple more weeks and learning some of the other verses. How about it, Hoosiers?
Fan Hamrick lives in Bloomington.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: A great hymn to sing for a great IU team | Opinion
Reporting by Fan Hamrick, Guest columnist / The Herald-Times
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
