Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Jesus is All the World to Me

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
I sat on our terrazzo tiled living room floor that day, and found Will Thompson’s “Jesus is All the World to Me.” The hymn would become my favorite hymn in the war. Singing it in the privacy of my bedroom one day as the war drew closer, I knew that this was the hymn for my family. I used to know the power of such old hymns as a little girl growing up in my mother’s church during the 1960s. Even as a little girl, I was drawn to them as I was to poetry. Maybe I loved them because Mamma sang them out loud through the house when she was down. Maybe I loved them because they were my first contact with poetry. I had memorized many of them as a child, held them to heart, and believed in their power. This was the old place of peace, I thought, where I needed to take my family. This would be our healing.