Mahalia came to visit me early this morning. :~)

I can work on this more later, but here's one thing cleared up:

Put your hand into the Hand of God
Let him lead you when the road is rough to trot

I'm pretty sure that what you heard as "trot" is a word chosen to fit the rhyme, although it is the wrong tense-- TROD. The correct word would be "tread," but it "don't sing right" that way, so she sang "trod." It is a word not used much anymore, so maybe she actually thought it WAS correct; if it is a composed piece maybe the author was the one that made the mistake.

When I haul an old gospel tune out of the past to do it now, I just go right ahead and fix that stuff-- I'm pretty good at catching the meaning and working with that to work with our denomination, where I use them. So I would rewrite that verse if I could not leave it out for whatever reason.

A word that fits (not the best sound to sing) and is the right tense would be PLOD. To use that word I would have to work in some imagery of weariness.... so if I really needed that verse I would look for a way to streamline something about letting Him lead me when I'm weary and can no longer plod. But, if He were leading me, I would not be plodding, I'd be skipping along.

So it's a problem, that verse.... for a typical problem like that I would spend the day letting it swim around in the back of my mind while I did chores, and let the melody run itself through me till my mind solves the text problem because my mind says that I MUST sing that song. But I will try to do it here, in front of you, to show you a bit of how that process goes for me... sometimes I can "catch" the solution while transcribing. I'll let Mahalia's voice pull me along and let the hand of God lead ME.

[reflecting....] Also correct tense and word but still off theologically: Let Him lead you when the weary road you've trod.

Trying again: Let him lead you FROM the weary road you've trod.

There it begins to come. There are many ways I can go, now, with that meaning.... Lead you OFF, or to be in vernacular lead you OUT, lead you PAST, lead you UP THAT weary road...

~Susan