There’s an old hymn I sang in church where the refrain goes:

Showers of blessing,
Showers of blessing we need:
Mercy-drops round us are falling,
But for the showers we plead.

Major Daniel Webster Whittle penned these words after serving in the American Civil War. Whittle referred to this passage in Ezekiel for his image of the Lord soaking his people with blessings like a day-long rain:

I will make them and the places surrounding my hill a blessing. I will send down showers in season; there will be showers of blessing.

Whittle turned to Jesus while lying in a hospital, his arm amputated above the elbow. In his despair, Whittle opened a New Testament his mother gave him as he left home. He read the small book over and over, and saw his way to salvation in Christ. His moment of conversion is powerful:

While laying in the hospital, a young man begged a nurse to pray for him, but she refused. He then begged Daniel who said “I can’t pray. I never prayed in my life. I am just as wicked as you are.” The young man again begged Daniel to pray for him. He felt God speaking to him, so he knelt at the boy’s bedside…

Major Whittle wrote “I dropped on my knees and held the boy’s hand in mine. In a few brok­en words I con­fessed my sins and asked Christ to for­give me. I be­lieved right there that He did for­give me. I then prayed ear­nest­ly for the boy. He be­came qui­et and pressed my hand as I prayed and plead­ed God’s prom­ises. When I arose from my knees, he was dead. A look of peace had come over his troubled face, and I can­not but be­lieve that God who used him to bring me to the Sav­ior, used me to lead him to trust Christ’s pre­cious blood and find par­don. I hope to meet him in hea­ven.”

In the middle of a bloody field hospital, arm throbbing from amputation (without anesthetic), lying next to a dying man, Daniel Webster Whittle embraced the Sender of Blessings. It’s a joyous mystery to me how some choose to follow the Lord in the midst of carnage and darkness.

Whittle wrote more than 200 hymns after the war. He never forgot the Lord’s goodness to him in granting him salvation. I love his line from his hymn I Know Whom I Have Believed:

I know not why God’s wondrous grace to me He hath made known;
Nor why—unworthy—Christ in love redeemed me for His own.

Whittle lived from that day in the hospital to the day of his death experiencing the blessings showering around him. As he wrote hymns one-handed, he never forgot the Lord’s goodness. Whittle’s example makes me aware of my need to pay attention to the goodness of the Lord, to peel off my coat and soak in the showers.

Ezekiel 34 in reading the Bible in 2023