Bobryanmusic.com: The Tracks

Only In Your Love

(Bob Ryan)

June, 2004

Words and Music by Bob Ryan

In 1995, my wife Helen and I found ourselves in the city of Osijek, in Eastern Croatia, in a small evangelical church on a Sunday evening. Peter Kusmic, Director of the Evangelical Seminary at Osijek, was delivering a sermon in Croatian, which we were hearing through the words of a translator.

Somewhere in the back of my conciousness, I became aware of a whining and crashing sound and then, slowly realized that what the translator was saying was that we should get up, in an orderly fashion, and head for the basement.

We had gone to Croatia to take part in a humanitarian effort begun by a church in Atlanta, Georgia, in cooperation with the Evangelical Church of Croatia. More specifically, to visit and encourage and in other ways help and assist the primarily Muslim refugees who were pouring out of Northern Bosnia and into Croatia at the time. Our focus was a refugee camp some ten kilometers from Osijek, at a place called Gasinci -- a former military camp.

The shelling we experienced in Osijek was mild compared to what residents there had undergone in the years between 1991 and 1994, when, at times, a thousand bombs a day were dropping into the city. Still it was unnerving.

We spent a tense night in blackout conditions hearing tanks roll by on the streets below, headed for the river that was about half a kilometer away. On the other side of the river, the Serb forces who surrounded the city on three sides had launched the rocket-grenades that evening probably partly out of boredom and partly in retaliation for similar attacks by Croatian forces earlier that month, somewhere West of the City.

For safety, we removed to the much smaller town of Djakovo, with it's large, handsome cathedral. This song began to take shape there, to be completed later upon my return to Phoenix.

Only In Your Love

The wind has come up hard tonight,
she’s howling in the darkness.
All the clouds are heavy grey and piled up in the sky.
Who am I, to stand against this storm of screaming madness?
All alone, I’m blown away; my courage on the fly.

All the hope I have is in your everlasting arms.
All my safety lies within your hands.
Everything that shelters me rests in you, eternally.
Only in your love can my heart hope to stand.

I have seen the faces of the displaced people yearning,
tried to work the answer out and come up pretty shy.
Hatred in the heart of man has half the planet burning
— house to house and street by street —
the bullet sings the lie.

All the hope I have is in your everlasting arms.
All my safety lies within your hands.
Everything that shelters me rests in you, eternally.
Only in your love can my heart hope to stand.

I have fought the fight I could, and fought it rather badly,
fallen in the dust of death without the strength to rise,
set my face against the storm of demons all around me.
Everywhere the angry darts are flaming in the skies.

All the hope I have is in your everlasting arms.
All my safety lies within your hands.
Everything that shelters me rests in you, eternally.
Only in your love can my heart hope to stand.

© 1995, 2004 by Bob Ryan
Published by Leaping Armadillo Music (ASCAP)
Written July — Sept. 1995 Djakovo, Croatia — Phoenix, AZ