Untitled Hymn (Come To Jesus)

Chris Rice builds this hymn as a series of invitations, each one matched to a different season of a life. It opens with a "weak and wounded sinner" who is told to lift his head because love is passing by, and the refrain repeats the same simple summons: come, and live. From there the song moves through the stages of a believer's walk. The burden is lifted and the stain washed away, so the response becomes singing. Then comes the image of a newborn baby unafraid to crawl, a reminder that stumbling is part of learning to walk, and the invitation shifts to falling on Jesus. The middle verses acknowledge the harder stretches, when the road is lonely, steep, and rain pours down, and the answer there is simply to cry to Jesus. Joy gets its own verse too, when love spills over and music fills the night and the only fitting response is to dance. The final stanza turns toward death with startling gentleness: at the last heartbeat, the believer kisses the world goodbye and flies to Jesus. The structure is deliberately childlike, one verb per verse, but the arc covers the whole of life and ends on glory's side.