Gone The Sun

Your sun shall no longer go down.... for the Lord will be your everlasting light, and the days of your mourning shall be ended. ( Isaiah 60 : 20 )

In 1862, during the US Civil War, General Daniel Butterfield wanted a new melody for " light our." And so, without any musical training, he composed one in his head.

Years later, the general wrote, " I called in someone who could write music, and practiced a change in the call of 'Taps' until I had it suit my ear, and then.... got it to my taste without being able to write music or knowing the technical name of any note, but, simply by ear, arranged it." General Butterfield gave the music to the brigade bugler, and the rest is history.

While there are no official lyrics to the hauntingly familiar strains of "Taps," here is a commonly accepted version of one verse:

Day is done, gone the sun,
From the hills, from the lake, from the sky;
All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.

What a comforting lyric as faithful members of the military are laid to rest! And what hope in the acknowledgment that God is near, even... especially... in death!

At a time when death and evil reigned, the prophet Isaiah anticipated a day when death itself would die. " Your sun shall no longer go down," he wrote to Israel, "for the Lord will be Your everlasting light" (60:20).

For those who follow Jesus, the strains of "Taps" are not a funeral dirge but a song of hope. "The days of your mourning shall be ended" (v.20). All is well. God is nigh. ....... Tim Gustafson

Sunset in one land is sunrise in another.


ဒီကေန႕ဟာ အေမရိကန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုၾကီး တခုလံုးအတြက္ ေအာက္ေမ့သတိယဖြယ္ေသာေန႕ (Memorial day)ျဖစ္ပါတယ္၊ ျပည္တြင္းစစ္၊ ပထမကမာၻစစ္ မွစ၍ ယခုေခာတ္အီရတ္ စစ္ပြဲထိတိုင္ ေသာစစ္ပြဲမ်ားတြင္ ပါဝင္ဆင္ႏြဲခဲ့၍ တိုင္းျပည္တြက္ အသက္ေပး၊ တိုက္ပြဲဝင္ခဲ့ေသာ အာဇာနည္ စစ္သူရဲေကာင္းတို႕ကို ခ်ီးက်ဴး ဂုဏ္ျပဳ၊ ေအာက္ေမ့ေသာ ေန႕ျဖစ္ပါသည္။
ဤေန႕ရက္၌ က်မလည္း ျမန္မာျပည္ၾကီး အဂၤလိပ္လက္ထက္၊ ဂ်ပန္လက္ထက္ မွ လြတ္ေျမာက္ဖို႕ရန္ ၾကိဳးပမ္းပါဝင္ဆင္ႏြဲခဲ့ေသာ၊ က်မအဖိုးနွင့္တကြ အာဇာနည္ ရဲေဘာ္ၾကီးမ်ားကို ဂုဏ္ျပဳပါ၏။ အသက္ေသြး၊ ေခၽြးနွင့္ ေပးဆပ္ကာရယူထားေသာ လြတ္လပ္ေရးၾကီးသည္ စစ္မွန္ေသာ လြတ္လပ္ေရး၊ တိုင္းခ်စ္ျပည္ခ်စ္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား ေမြးထုတ္ေပးေသာ လြတ္လပ္ေရးၾကီး ျဖစ္ပါေစ ဆုမြန္ေကာင္းေတာင္းလိုက္ပါ၏။
စစ္မွန္ေသာလြတ္လပ္ေရး အတြက္အသက္၊ ေသြးေခၽြး၊ ေပးဆပ္၊ ဆက္လက္ထမ္းေဆာင္ေနေသာ ရဲေဘာ္ ေကာင္းမ်ားကိုလည္း ထာဝရဘုရား၏ အလင္းေတာ္ ကြယ္ေပ်ာက္မသြားေၾကာင္းကို ေျပာၾကားရင္း ခြန္အားေပးလိုပါ၏။
သားေကာင္းရတနာမ်ား ျဖစ္ပါေစ။