Would you be my stretcher bearers, when I can no longer stand?
Would you each pick up a corner of my pallet in your hand?
This burden’s just too heavy, I find I cannot bear
Its pain, its grief, its sorrow; and so I chance to dare —
To ask if you would carry me through valleys dark and wide;
Then set me safely down again where peace and hope abide.
God said His yoke was easy and His burden would be light;
That’s surely why He sent you each to lead me through the night.
And now I must lift others and the burdens they may bring;
I’ll be a stretcher bearer, carrying wounded for the King.
This poem is sometimes credited to Thomas Albert Crawford (1897-1980), but his is a different poem that begins “My stretcher is one scarlet stain” – written in 1916, apparently after he was wounded at the Battle of the Somme in France. In her book Diamonds in the Dust: 366 Sparkling Devotions, Joni Eareckson Tada credits the above poem to Bev Engeldinger. I have no information on this author.
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