Whispering Winds Blog

HYMNS OF PEACE AND COMFORT is published! This is the first full-length book in the series of books I’m writing about selected hymns and how they help us talk with God – Talking with God through Music. This book includes reflections on 51 hymns based on the theme of peace and comfort. For each hymn, the melody line and verses are shown, followed by the basic facts of the hymn – who wrote the words, what scripture the text relates to, who composed the music, and the name of the tune. The selection ends with some kind of story. It may be what prompted the author to write the hymn. Or, what impact the hymn has had on individuals or globally. Or what experience I have had with the hymn personally.

My original vision for this book was for it to be about 100 of my favorite hymns. When I started to select the hymns to include, I narrowed my list down to about 300 hymns. Oops! That’s too big for a manageable book. With a 2-page spread for each hymn, plus a few extra pages thrown in to organize the hymns into meaningful sections, I would have a 600 – 700 page book. Very few people like to pick up that big a book to read, myself included. So, I decided to develop a series of books, with each book focused on a particular theme. In 2018, the year I started writing this book, my word for the year was Peace. (Each year, instead of making any New Year’s resolutions, I choose one word to be my focus for the year.) Since I was already thinking about Peace, I decided to have this book include hymns of Peace and Comfort.

At this point, my plan is for the next book in the series to be the hymns of church holidays, which will be mostly the carols of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, and the hymns of Easter.

Now for the title of this blog post – “Ready or not, it’s here.” The books have arrived. If you would like to buy one (or more, possibly for Christmas presents), we need to go back to early 20th century technology. If you would like to buy Hymns of Peace and Comfort, let me know how many books you want and what your mailing address is. You can reach me by:

I had hoped to set up PayPal on my blog to enable payment by credit card, but after spending a couple hours trying to figure out the integration of WordPress and PayPal, I decided to go back to baking Christmas cookies instead. I hope to have the capability added to my blog by the time my next book is ready, hopefully in about ten months. 

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a PEACEFUL New Year!