What are you looking for?

A friend of mine knowing that I’ve been suffering from writer’s block for the past several months sent this to me, a poem by one of my favorite authors about the writing of poetry.  I’ll add one thought but otherwise let the work speak for itself.  I remember several years ago listening to acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee read some of his poetry and thinking at the time that his words created silence in me.  In regards to the last lines of Mr. Berry’s poem here, I’ve often thought that the best books, poems, and songs – though filled with sounds and words – create a quiet place in us and give us an opportunity to actually listen to silence.  Now, from Mr. Berry: “How To Be a Poet” by Wendell Berry (to remind myself) i Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment. ii Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. iii Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

Over the course of the next several weeks leading up to Christmas, we are going to offer a series of weekly posts to tell again the story of the birth of Christ, and we’re going to offer them as a sort of a “Virtual Advent Wreath.” If you are unfamiliar with Advent Wreaths, here’s a short description of what they mean and how to make one of your own. As a kid, I marked time by its proximity to Christmas.  I had good reason for measuring time this way.  With the cold and often snowy Indiana winters of my youth, together with the warm home my parents created for us, the Christmas I knew was everything a little kid could want it to be. It was never overrated. Never. Two things were at work in the mind of this little boy as the big day drew near—memory and anticipation.  It was so exhilarating to watch the space beneath the tree begin to fill up with gifts bearing my name—treasures of incalculable worth.  I would shake them, listen to them, smell them and contemplate their heft.  It almost didn’t matter what they were.  They were for me.  Their presence alone was intoxicating. With impressions like these securely fixed and coupled with the overall sense that each holiday season tended to be better than the one before, by the time Christmas Eve rolled around my memories and anticipation played off of one another with a greater potency than a stout cup of coffee coursing through the veins of this ten year old boy attempting to comply with his orders to go to sleep. This, in itself, is a memory that warms my heart even now. What is Christmas if not a holiday built upon memory and anticipation?  It is a day we celebrate by remembering something that really happened—the first coming of Jesus Christ, born meek and lowly as a humble king wrapped in swaddling clothes all those years ago. It is also a day to anticipate something we’re still waiting for—Jesus’ return in power as a mighty King with the words “Lord of Lords” illuminating His blazing robe. (Rev 19:16) We live between these two advents—Jesus’ first and second coming.  The word “advent” comes from a Latin root meaning “coming to.”  The first advent has already happened.  Jesus came to earth in the form of a baby born in a manger in Bethlehem.  The second advent we’re still waiting for.  This is where Christians today live—between the already and the not yet. Through the centuries, Christians have remembered His first coming to earth to be our Immanuel (meaning “God with Us”) and anticipated His return by taking time in the weeks leading up to Christmas day to observe a season of remembering and anticipation, which we call “Advent.” The aim of the series of the posts for this virtual Advent Wreath is to guide you through an observance of this season of remembering and anticipating the coming of our Lord and King, Jesus Christ. Here, we’ll remember the story of how before Jesus’ birth, God’s people longed for His forgiveness in order that they might be restored to a right relationship with Him.  God’s promised remedy was that He would send them a Savior. We’ll remember their anticipation from the vantage point of seeing how and, more importantly, Who God provided to fulfill that covenant.  And we’ll remember the story of Jesus’ birth and the events surrounding it—that true tall tale of the coming of Christ. We’ll also look ahead to Jesus’ return—an event inseparably joined to His birth in Bethlehem.   The reason He came in the first place, taking on flesh and blood, was to offer up that body on the cross in order to die in the place of the sinners He came to save.  When He rose from the grave on Easter morning, He defeated the power of sin and death. However, although His work on the cross was perfect and complete in accomplishing our salvation, the world in which we live is one that is still very broken and filled with sickness, disaster and many other kinds of suffering and sadness. Christmas is a perfect time not only to remember the longing of those who awaited Christ’s first coming, but to yearn ourselves for His return when all shall be made well.  We live between two advents, between what we remember and what we anticipate.  We are in the middle of an unfolding story filled with harrowing journeys, murderous rulers, shepherds conversing with angels, wise nomads coming from the east and apostles sailing to the west. Somehow, by the preserving grace of God, the story of this baby boy born in that stable outside the streets of David’s town has found its way across oceans and centuries to you, right here, right now.

The boy’s legs were useless. He could write and speak his name perfectly well (Brett), he could use his young hands to grip the braided climbing rope supporting his frame, but his body from the waist down was as inoperable as felled masts of white pine. Like the moon in a clear, harvest sky, he dangled there thirty feet above the ground, a suspended child, a saint as it turns out, exhausted by the events leading up to this moment where he glowed at the upper reaches of the man-made rock-climbing tower out of nothing short of utter fatigue and extreme revelry where the two emotions mixed and mingled as if they were reunited friends. The raucous cheering of the audience below made it perfectly clear that this was no ordinary moment, either for them or for Brett. Normally this spot on the sidewalk adjacent to the climbing wall is a somewhat stale, recurrent place as participants, mostly high-school aged, with perfectly functioning bodies take to the fixed rocks on the wall each and every day during the summer months, some reaching the top with ease, others giving up apathetically midway, some never bothering to feign an attempt. But today, if only for a few passing hours, this sun-drenched location atop the bluffs of Pelican Lake in northwest Minnesota is, like its biblical lakeside village counterpart, a Capernaum of sorts, a place where not only the physically impaired are raised, but the physically well can, if our eyes are open to the scene, find a healing as well. A multi-generational crowd composed of adults, college and high-school aged gathers. We come and go as we please. I feel the sunlight searing my sandaled toes. I feel my toes. I feel. The boy, currently draped in a climbing harness and seated in his wheelchair, awaits final clearance to begin his ascent. Two men, his counselor-leaders for the week, also donning harnesses, are prepared to climb the wall with Brett assisting him along the way. They are his feet. I witness the utmost patience of these gentlemen as they coax, urge and literally lift the physically crippled young man to a height and an experience that he might never have reached without such assistance, without such community, without such delighted belief. Like a banner on top of the world, this scene is a flagrant display of courage that rivals any contemporary professional athlete’s stamina and pursuit of adulatory perfection. The oldest of three siblings, I am for all intents and purposes a scaredy-cat. For as far back as I can remember, I maintained an overly cautious and hyper-responsible childhood. I rarely took risks then, and I find I rarely take them now as an adult. But as I am prone to do, tears percolate from my sunglass-veiled eyes at the very sight of such a risky, overtly spiritual and Christ-like display, which I am convinced I am privy to. The boy possesses a rowdy belief that he has it in him to scale the wall. His counselor-leaders, in turn, possess a believing hope that, just like the young man lowered by his pals through the thatched roof to the feet of Jesus, their faith will heal the boy whom they now hoist. Though science might disagree, this physical exhibition has far less to do with actual physics than it does with the intangibilities of lion-like courage, the swearing off of fear, and the Ghost of God moving with such ease and freedom through the discarded remnants of society as to render them mesmerizingly holy, while leaving the beautiful remainder as limp as withered limbs. Has Your Kingdom finally come? The climbing wall is made up of a pattern of strategically placed rocks and of various planks of wood, all held together by the bones of structural integrity. The human body is much the same, held together by bones, capillaries, vessels and ligaments. The body of Christ is made up of many parts, talents and gifts, some receiving glory, some rarely receiving acknowledgment if any notice at all, but all are worthy in their unworthiness to serve the other. And that is the way it is in Capernaum and along the shores of Pelican Lake where the broken in body are Heaven-strong in heart and spirit, possessing a belief so childishly simple that it seems too good to possess any truth at all. Here, the weakest things of earth shame the glamorous and the strong, and the physically well, if we are lucky enough, are overcome with the shocking realization that we too need just as much help in all our climbing, flailing and falling. At the height of exalted exhaustion, may we peer through the torn roofs of our lives and view the gathered community in support – those who cared for us from the very beginning, those clinging to the taut ropes of both theirs and our faith – and may we bless the Lord of our once-broken souls who coaxed, urged and lifted us to the good and final End.

There is a scene in the film A River Runs Through It where the narrator, Norman Maclean, describes his education, saying, “I attended the school of the Reverend Maclean. He taught nothing but reading and writing. And, being a Scot, believed that the art of writing lay in thrift.” The scene flashed to a young Norman handing a paper to his father. His father scans it and hands it back, saying, “Again, half as long.” Norman goes back, writes his paper again, only half as long, and his father reads it again and repeats his instruction, “Again, half as long.” This is strange instruction to students today who mistake the purpose of writing in school as being more of a quantitative endeavor than a qualitative one. Many students, I imagine, think the hardest writing assignments are the longest ones, operating on the notion that writing twenty pages is harder than writing five. This theory inspires the thinking that the more they write, the smarter they appear. But as Eisenhower said, “An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.” What if the Reverend Maclean is right. What if the art of writing lies in thrift—the fewer words the better? We want students to embody truth, beauty, goodness, wisdom and eloquence. St. Augustine said we educate to “seek to lead the citizens of earth toward citizenship in heaven while instilling in them the desire to introduce the values of the heavenly kingdom into the kingdom they presently inhabit.” So we want students not just to know things. We want students to remain students and become teachers. And we want them to be able to teach what they know gracefully and persuasively. This takes eloquence. Eloquence is the ability to understand ideas and concepts and then to express them with persuasion and grace. I believe we see this objective outlined in 1 Peter 3:15 “In your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect…” This verse describes eloquence in its purest sense. First notice that Peter is saying that this kind of speech is honoring to the Lord. Christians honor Him by being prepared to testify of the hope within us. But then notice the two prongs of Peter’s point—that we are to be prepared to give a reasoned defense for the Gospel (PERSUASION), and that we are to do this with gentleness and respect (GRACE). This, I think, is as much an art form as anything. So if you are one who teaches, I submit to you this thesis: Every teacher is an art teacher. And you should regard you self as such. As a teacher, do more than impart raw data. You teach young minds to receive that data, process it, comprehend it and grasp how the data they’ve just received comes to bear on the rest of what they know. You want them to know truth, recognize beauty, practice goodness and live wisely. Why? Of course so that they might glorify God and enjoy Him forever. But how is this done? Not merely through stowing away all they know. But through “seeking to lead citizens of earth toward citizenship in heaven.” The New Testament calls this the Great Commission—to go and make disciples of all the nations, bearing witness to Christ Jesus with our whole lives. This is an art—balancing grace with persuasion and conviction with love while using words to paint a picture of truth, beauty, goodness and wisdom for all the world to see. And as it is with all art, some students are naturals at this while others struggle from the start. But every artist, to be good at their craft, must log hours of practice. And they must be taught. They must try and fail. They must savor the two things they get right, even though there are a dozen others they got wrong. They must develop logic and reason. This stuff only comes through practice. And to do this, they must use words. So cultivate eloquence in your students by requiring them to trade in the currency of words. Make them write. Make them speak. Give them the gift of the experience of talking in front of an audience, even if they’re terrified. Try to help them understand why this experience is a gift. As a teacher, you can measure how well your students know the truth you’ve taught them when they can tell you what you’ve taught them. You know they have seen beauty by their expression of it. They will reveal their committment to goodness by the grace employed in their speech, both toward those who agree and those who don’t. But don’t mistake flowery words for eloquence. Persuasion and eloquence are not the same. Mere persuasion can often be fruit of wearing down of the other side under the weight of the sheer quantity of words. Trade in the currency of words. Make words count, not by how often they’re used, but by how well. Look for grace and persuasion, for truth, beauty, goodness and wisdom in those words. Help them hone their craft of expression by requiring them to speak, write, and respond with regularity. And evaluate their work. Be willing to hand it back and say “Again, half as long” in order that they might be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks them for a reason for the hope that is in them—and that they might do it with gentleness and respect. Grade them on reason. Grade them on rhetoric. But grade them on kindness and humility too. Reward them not just for the completion of the assignment, but for employing truth, beauty, goodness, and wisdom gently and with respect, lest they lose their hearers as Proverbs 18:19 predicts: “A brother offended is more unyielding than a strong city, and quarreling is like the bars of a castle.” May God be pleased to use your investment in these children so that they might spend their lives seeking to “lead the citizens of earth toward citizenship in heaven while instilling in them the desire to introduce the values of the heavenly kingdom into the kingdom they presently inhabit.”

It’s a beautiful thing to be reminded of why we do what we do and why we love what we love. I recently spent the weekend in Spokane, Washington (a lovely part of the country) speaking to some high school students and young adults. The subject of the four talks I gave from Friday through Sunday was the concept of Shalom and the greater mission of God. And my time there was as fulfilling for me as it was for anyone else there. I speak at my own church – The Mercy House – each and every week, for the most part. I’ve been doing it for over four years and we’ve built a community that I love to be a part of. It’s a creative, young, missional community and I feel lucky to lead such an amazing group of people. But it’s also true that what I have to say and how I say it is rather old hat. “Yes, Matt, we’ve heard that story before,” or “Yes, Matt, that analogy was a fine one to make the first three times we heard it.” The particular lens and life experiences God has given me to speak truth through are what make me so it’s hard to be anything else. Of course, the Spirit brings something fresh each week–I hope!–and yet there’s always going to be some sense of familiarity to it. I guess I picture Bruce Springsteen’s wife going, “Yeah, yeah, I know all those songs. They were good the first 2,000 times I heard them.” Okay, so I’m not Springsteen… But this weekend, the crowd was brand new. The scenario was a blank slate. And the response was fantastic. The comments and feedback I would receive sounded strangely familiar – like the ones that were made when we first planted our church north of Indianapolis and people began to hear a message in a way that was refreshing and timely for them. And it felt refreshing all over again. There’s something about being able to step outside your typical situation or job and find a fresh audience with which to share it with that inspires you of what you are doing in the first place. I find myself hitting my head against the wall after particular Sundays in which maybe it wasn’t as sharp or inspirational or moving or convicting as others. It’s frustrating to feel like you’re just spinning your wheels in front of the same crowd, wondering if you’re getting through or if you’re wasting your efforts. To be honest, maybe I’m not even sure what to take from this. I returned back to my home context this morning and it felt like the same old stuff. Maybe I need to quit and become an circuit rider – some preacher on his horse who goes from town to town (which in my case is an old Corolla). Maybe it’s a good thing to remember the original feeling. Then again, maybe it’s revealing a need to please an audience and feel appreciated. It’s probably all three, which only reveals I haven’t the slightest idea what to ultimately take from the experience.

Resurrection Letters, Volume II is artful and beautiful. We’ve come to expect that from Andrew Peterson’s work, haven’t we? Like magnet to steel, we detect a divine pull. With the rising sun, the voice of beauty beckons. Something important is about to be illuminated. Melody after melody, phrase upon phrase, the Tennessee songwriter with a Barnabas heart imparts familiar truths unconventionally. Despite tackling some of the same topics as other Christian songwriters, it usually feels like we are getting a remarkably different take; one that burrows inside the emotional truth far deeper than might be expected from songs that are less nuanced and thoughtful. The first verse establishes a theme. Like a prophecy or parable, verse one is often a type of that which is to come. In succeeding verses, the type is developed more expansively, majestically and/or divinely. Routinely, from the AP pen, we discover—if we have ears to hear—that each line has a corresponding line from prior verses, similar, but different. Each line depicts something specific to the verse where it is found, but also cleverly corresponds to the other verses. For example, notice how angels show up in all three verses of “Rise and Shine” from Carried Along. We find references to sleeping and waking (rising and shining) in all three verses. Later, the bridge literately links to the chorus, which magically and succinctly solidify the song into a cohesive whole. Though each verse tells related but different stories, the chorus applies accurately and appropriately to all three verses. So as we (for this is a joint exercise) prepare for the task of identifying the top moments of Resurrection Letters, Volume II, please note that it is a somewhat trivial exercise. As AP continues to hone his considerable songwriting gift, it’s become indelibly obvious that Peterson songs are compelling because at their heart, they are superb stories. There’s nothing wrong with parsing lyrical passages and musical moments from Resurrection Letters, Volume II, but let’s be clear: these songs are best appreciated as a complete, cohesive package. The regal beauty of this collection of songs is found in the seamless, thematic congruency. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun! So, without further ado, here they are, the Top Ten Moments from Resurrection Letters, Volume II. 1. “Raise up, oh you sleeper,” the opening line from “All Things New.” It’s an Andy Gullahorn vocal contribution. Like another biblical mandate, “If any man have ears to hear, let him hear,” it none to subtly signals that, “If we snooze, we lose” (now you know why AP doesn’t take songwriting tips from me!). Co-written with Ben Shive and Andy Gullahorn, this song is eloquent encouragement, a reminder that God doesn’t see the utter black of guilt and shame. He sees Jesus’ sacrificial atoning blood. With a suspenseful string prelude (honorable mention for the best moment in this song), with megaphone in hand, Gullahorn reminds us why there is reason to awake: “The dawn is upon you.” 2. The resounding chorus of “Hosanna,” another Peterson/Shive/Gullahorn cooperative, easily makes the top ten. The celestial hook is made more magnificent by the harsh, vivid indictments which precede it. The more a heart surrenders to the will of God, the more it recognizes its need for a Savior. The stately choir sings this melody with intense passion. With soaring harmonies, one can almost catch a vision of the King of Kings cresting the mountain, on a white horse he will ride (sorry, I didn’t mean to channel my inner Michael Martin Murphy there). 3. The beautiful irony of “Invisible God.” While the lyrics explicitly acknowledge the outlandish idea of a personal relationship with a transcendent God, it also affirms intelligent design—not from an arcane textbook—but from astounding evidence advanced in the process of living. This lyrical cousin to “Windows in the World” is a gentle reminder—the infamous velvet-gloved fist—that we divorce ourselves from God with a willful choice to ignore the evidence. “If any man has ears to hear, let him hear,” is not only a nice piece of biblical sarcasm, it’s is profound reminder that if we listen, we will hear. If we look, we will see. 4. “… and you set me free with that ball and chain ..,” the line from “Hosea.” This is another example of the way in which Andy’s perceptive, contrarian perspective sheds light on profound theological truth. 5. The evocative richness of “Love is a Good Thing.” “It can hurt like a blast from a hand grenade when all that used to matter is blown away,” is one metaphorical example of many used in this song which vividly describe the irony of being held captive by Christ. Like the ball and chain that gripped Gomer, Love is a good thing. 6. There’s a magnificent goosebump moment in “Don’t Give Up on Me” which follows this great passage, which others have noted: “I have felt the holy fire of love, been burned by the holy fire of love, made clean by the holy fire of love.” In the last verse as the singer wakes up in the golden dream, something happens to the texture of the musical canvas which elegantly move the listener from his own place, right into the middle of the singer’s dream. I’m a reviewer guy and as such should have some kind of dispassionate curiosity of how the Shive/Gullahorn/Peterson team created this moment. But like good sausage, I just want to bask in its utter goodness; seeing behind the curtain might somehow reduce the charm of the moment. With the, “Now I wake up in a golden dream,” line, I feel the crisp air, I hear the birds sing, I see a striking celestial glow. I feel this magical, supernatural moment which sonically reproduces a sliver of the majesty found in the unknowingly saturated moments of daily living. Man, I’m there. Man, woman, and child, each one of is there. 7. For consequential revelry, how about the song, “Rocket?” So, I have to pick one moment? How about this line?: ” … to count down the seconds, as destiny beckons into the arms of the astral glow.” Maybe it’s not appropriate, and maybe I’m stretching the resurrection theme too far, but I can’t keep myself from following the resurrection theme in “Rocket”—please forgive me—for imagining Jesus wearing a jetpack as He disappears into the clouds, while the disciples stare skyward. 8. “Windows in the World” is a handcrafted masterpiece, a prototype of AP’s songwriting method as noted earlier. While he could have chosen many things, he picked movies, Communion, and marriage to illustrate “windows in the world.” Besides the beauty of the overall concept, my favorite aspect of this song is the songwriter’s choice of marriage as one example of what some call “layered songwriting.” The earthly window of marriage is a reflection—a type—of Christ’s love for the Church. “It’s a window in the world, a little portal where you get a better view.” Indeed. 9. The Bridge in “I’ve Got News.” “So you think you don’t need anyone to love you? So you think you don’t need anyone to love. But you do.” In this section, the normally poetic AP writes uncharacteristically direct. I’m a loner. I have great friends and family, with whom I enjoy spending time. Still, given a choice, my natural inclination is to do what I do alone: books, movies, and music. Me and my art. Then one night I dreamed that my wife of 28 years was gone. The dream was lucid, as was the pain. And guess what? The pain was at least one hundred times worse than I would have guessed. It was palpable. I started to cry the kind of cry that was so deep that I couldn’t catch my breath. I remembered the unspeakable love that I have for my wife. And it changed my behavior (for a half day or so, which is a miracle at my house). Part Three of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People discusses interdependence as being a higher calling than dependence and independence. Then there’s Galations 6:2-3 — Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. We were meant to love. We were meant to be loved. Once again, our friend Andrew Peterson uses his own personal transparency to bless us, reminding us of something we may have known, but buried. Like a dog and his bone, we bury our personal wounds. We don’t want anybody to see it, steal it, or touch it. Grrr. 10. When the choir joins in on the chorus of “The Good Confession (I Believe).” In a most moving way, we hear tacit agreement that the story of one of us is to some extent, the story of us all. The only thing more moving, would be to have the historical Church join in—the disciples, Joseph, Mary, David, Moses, and Abraham singing along too. Some day, they will. I’ve often said that the most moving art is that art which compresses a lifetime of emotion into one work. It’s a formidable challenge, a challenge which AP has navigated successfully, and then some. For we sense the weighty significance of not only our respective lives, but how those individual pieces fit collectively into the Church. My story, yours, the story of our forefathers and apostolic fathers and their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, it’s the same story, written with supreme, infinite wisdom by the Author of Love. That, my friends, brings glory to God. After all, it’s what He wrought. At the end of the day, that’s why I support Andrew Peterson’s music. So, now it’s your turn. I purposely waited for a few weeks to write this, giving us both the opportunity to listen and reflect. My top ten happen to be the group I chose today. Tomorrow will be different. It’s that kind of record. Nevertheless, don’t let the difficulty of the task hold you back. What are your favorite moments from Resurrection Letters, Volume II?

Disclaimer: You may read this and want to defend Andrew Peterson.  I assure you, that won’t be necessary.  I read On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness with my son and we loved it.  Also, I’ve spent time conveying to Andrew in rather specific detail why we loved it and what it did in our imaginations. He knows my deep affection for the book.  He also knows what I’m about to say is not a criticism.  It is, however, funny.  If you want to read up on Andrew’s book and make comments about it, may I direct you to Jonathan Roger’s insightful review.  If you want to discuss the strange phenomenon of dubious honors, this is your place. On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness recently won an award.  I saw it on Andrew’s website.  “Darn right,” I thought.  “Let the accolades begin,” said I.  “Let the movie rights get bought up as the folks at Newberry, Medallion and Pulitzer stand and take notice.” Whenever any of the square pegs are recognized for the excellence they create, it feels like a win for my team.  So I clicked on the link to get the details of “our” book’s recent award.  If you feel me here, if you know exactly what I mean by “it feels like a win for my team,” let me tell you what “we” won. “Best cover.” Yep.  Best cover. Oh man!  Visions of Andrew sitting tucked away in some corner of some coffee shop, pouring over the manuscript– every word, every comma, every exclamation point!  I imagined him getting his two-inch thick editor’s mark-up back from the publisher, as if they took his string of thoughts and tied a thousand little knots in them for him to go back to that same coffee shop untie untie.  I even imagine his wife sitting at the dinner table whistfully poking at her cooling meal with the last prong on her otherwise clean fork, keeping one eye on the clock whose second hand is tick, tick, ticking away the daylight as her husband is peck, peck, pecking away at his laptop, unaware of the hour. But guess what? Best cover!  This warrants a hearty, “Well done, Andrew!  May your cup of satisfaction runneth over!” Having congratulated Andrew on his winning book cover, he replied, “A dubious honor, to be sure.” It got me thinking about my years in seminary.  You’ve got a couple hundred first year students eagerly showing up for “Preparation and Delivery of Sermons.”  We were, after all, preachers in waiting.  The class assumed we knew next to nothing about public speaking, exposition of Scripture or time management. (My professor’s wise adage for sermon length was “Every sermon should feel like twenty minutes.” Nice. But I digress.) There were four preaching classes students took over the course of the MDiv program.  We’d write and deliver two sermons per semester to a class of peers who would also do the same for us.  When we weren’t preaching, we were evaluating each other.  We had these little forms we filled out where we had to make positive comments and offer “constructive” feedback. Every so often a visiting professor, scholar or lecturer would be on campus, and they’d be invited to sit in on these preaching classes we referred to as “batting practice.”  Imagine discovering that John Piper, Sinclair Ferguson or Tim Keller was going to sit in on your preaching class the day you were slated to preach.  There was, of course, nothing for it.  So looking like a High School varsity basketball team assistant in your khaki slacks and navy blue sport coat, you’d give it all you had, which usually wasn’t much. Well, a friend of mine was scheduled to preach on one such day.  A very famous scholar/teacher was at the back of the room listening in as this poor guy preached maybe his fourth sermon ever.  When he was through, the class began to offer their feedback. Our professor asked the esteemed visitor in the back of the room if he would like to chime in.  The icon whose books we all had on our shelves offered this helpful little gem: “I really liked your scripture text.” Ouch! I had a whole bit about how this topic would be good preparation for our celebration of Christmas—God giving a good gift in response to our obvious deficiencies and needs, saving us according to a plan that was all His since we had nothing.  That’s the pastor in me.  But let me go at it another way.  I’m grateful today that there is no contradiction between a lifetime of dubious honors and the hope of hearing at the end, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”  God assures His people that His strength is made perfect in our weakness. Still, there are times in life when it sure seems the Lord is exceedingly committed to perfecting His strength in us publicly.  Just ask my crest-fallen peer who slunk back into his chair with the words “nice text” rattling around in his all-of-the-sudden-vocation-questioning mind, imagining his retirement party or his wake (whichever came first), where one after another would come forward to say things like “If nothing else, the man sure could pick a text.” Have you ever been the recipient of a dubious honor?  Have you ever received obvious sympathy applause?  Do you have a trophy case of “Best Effort” ribbons?  Regale us.

It is one of the ironies of Appalachia that beautiful, changing, fall leaves create a scene that is Edenic just before the bitter winter comes. As it is difficult to enjoy a Sunday night when Monday’s work is already filling the next slot in the viewmaster of our lives, so it is hard to forget that winter is stalking us, and we ought to enjoy the glories of fall while it lasts. Autumn, with its auburn and amber, is a fragile paradise. It is always a season on the brink. The fall of man was, without doubt, the great cataclysm of our history. But the season of fall I find, is more like the preceding Eden. The winter, however, surely is a fall. This is bitter consequence, when men’s hands if not their hearts, go cold. But like common grace still abounding in a fallen world, so does winter have its many charms. Snow descends on strong, submissive trees. Green and brown tokens of bygone seasons peek out from beneath garments of white, like a child’s eyes stand out among layers of a mother’s careful wrapping. The wonder of the winter storm is that it is both beautiful and terrifying, like any woman a man has ever loved. The children are thrilled by the snow -to them it’s magic. They gaze at the pale descent and rejoice at its rapid accumulation. Our inner-child is glad too, but our inner-adult considers spanking our inner-child (working Freudians everywhere into hysteria) because of snow tires, broken hips, bad roads, and predawn scraping of our windshields with an inadequate MasterCard. The same MasterCard that will soon weigh us down in materialistic debt because we have been fooled into thinking silly things about money and joy. But in Appalachia, like so much of the world influenced but not yet overtaken by the furious love of God, we reflect on important things. We consider a small child in the next room, the next house up, or another country. We think of a small child born very far away, what seems like a long time ago. We remember that we had forgotten and we try to remember so that we won’t forget. More than gifts, but yes, gifts. Yes, families, but more than families. Decorations, yes, but also a changed heart. Mercy where wrath was deserved. Music into silence, light into darkness. He came. In answer to that desperate fall, he came. So now there can be goodwill where his favor rests. And because of him, through him, there can be peace. Even on earth. Even, in Appalachia.

This past Sunday was All Saints Day, the day in the liturgical church calendar we remember and honor those who have died in the Lord.  This has always been a really meaningful service for me, but this year I walked into our little Anglican church in Nashville with some trepidation.  Our pastor, Thomas, had sent an e-mail out to everyone in the congregation asking us to tell our stories of loved ones no longer with us whose lives impacted ours in a profound way.  Teachers who changed our minds and hearts, parents, grandparents or siblings that loved us well, friends who pointed us to God.  He was devoting the entire sermon to these testimonies and wanted us to honor those lives publicly. Death is no stranger to my family.  I lost my father five years ago to a rare disease when he was only 56.  I’m still feeling the ripple effects of how that has changed my views on God, life, death, parenting, expectations for my time on this earth, everything.  To be honest, it is harder in some ways today than it was initially.  Now that I have three children of my own I think of his suffering and death with a heaviness that I could not understand in my twenties.  I don’t know what he was thinking or feeling in those last days before he died, but as I imagine leaving my own children I have a little more understanding of the weight he must have carried leaving us behind.  I now feel free to be very, very sad about it sometimes.  Not just for my dad but that suffering and death exist at all.  During lent when my pastor puts the ashes on my head and says, “From dust you are and to dust you shall return” I’m always a bit jolted.  Our youth-obsessed society is not comfortable talking about these things and most of the time, neither am I. But something amazing happened that Sunday morning with those two-hundred or so people crammed into our sanctuary.  Our collective sorrow, shared with each other, turned into the most beautiful and cathartic peace.  Jesus’ peace that passes all understanding.  I heard elderly widows honor their husbands and end by talking about Jesus’ blessed assurance.  I heard men honor their grandmothers and fathers and former professors and friends.  I heard a young woman honor the husband and father she and her daughters had lost only a year before with such dignity and grace that I knew again Jesus was real. And then I got up there and bawled like a baby from my first sentence to my last.  I was a mess.  No poise, no grace, just a really terrible and awkward cry-face.  And somehow in that safe place I was completely okay with that.  I talked about my dad and where he came from, what he loved and how he pointed me to Jesus.   How he left me with a legacy that would outlive him and all of us in this life, a heavenly Father whose kingdom has no end. By the time the service was over and we sang our last hymn there wasn’t a dry eye in the place.  To be able to laugh, cry and embrace all of life from birth to death with my church family is a precious gift.  To know that mine is one of countless stories and that I am not alone gives me strength and comfort. All that is required is for me to show up and occasionally make a fool of myself to be known as I really am. If you want to continue this exercise of honoring those who have gone before us, share your story here.  As Thomas said that Sunday, we see a small part of the communion table now but one day we will sit at it in its entirety with all the saints:  past, present and future. Amen.  Come Lord Jesus.

From The Best of A.W. Tozer: “No man is better for knowing that God so loved the world of men that He gave His only begotten Son to die for their redemption. In hell there are millions who know that. Theological truth is useless unless it is obeyed. The purpose behind all doctrine is to secure moral action.” “What is generally overlooked is that truth as set forth in the Christian Scriptures is a moral thing; it is not addressed to the intellect only, but to the will also. It addresses itself to the total man, and its obligations cannot be discharged by grasping it mentally. Truth engages the citadel of the human heart and is not satisfied until it has conquered everything there. The will must come forth and surrender its sword. It must stand at attention to receive orders, and those orders it must joyfully obey. Short of this any knowledge of Christian truth is inadequate and unavailing.” “Bible exposition without moral application raises no opposition….As long as people can hear orthodox truth divorced from life they will attend and support churches without objection….Much that passes for New Testament Christianity is little more than objective truth sweetened with song and made palatable by religious entertainment.” Now, this is almost funny coming from one who ran willy-nilly in his late teens from legalism into license, like a chipmunk my daughter and I once saw in my yard that ran frantically out of the claws of our black cat straight into the mouth of our little black terrier (I did manage to rescue the chipmunk). This sort of writing, whether from Tozer, or MacDonald, or Lewis, or whoever, used to scare me and get my heart pounding. But as I get older it really prompts desire in me. I do know experientially at this point in my life that there is no will-power in me that can do this or that for God, as if the Christian life is lived by mere mental and moral effort; it is only the living Truth, Christ Himself with me, that can do so. All I can do is confess, “I belong to You. I give myself to You. And I want You to set me on fire, in every aspect of my being, with You.” Then, of course, I must step out in faith and expect Him to do so; I must watch and wait for Him to show me, not only things in my life that need changing (as if this were all about me) but I must watch and wait especially for those opportunities He invariably gives us to love others, to help others, to draw others into relationship, or deeper relationship, with Him. And I must also watch for those teachable moments where God is giving the Lesson of the Day through some circumstance or person; our daily life is a great devotional if we just keep our eyes and ears open. Faith – faith in Christ, the real kind, the Biblical kind – always brings serious life change, changes in outlook, changes in behavior. Mere intellectual assent doesn’t accomplish a whole lot; the demons intellectually assent to all kinds of truth about God and yet never faithe in God. I can assent to a million different courses of action as being good and right, and yet sit and do nothing. From Screwtape: “Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head.” People like Tozer and MacDonald were always reacting to the climate of their day on this point. They were always sounding the cry, “Beware of mere intellectual assent!” At least some of what is called Christianity throughout all ages (and, gasp, even today!) is really mental assent to ideas, theories, or facts about God, disguised as the reliant faith in God that produces action. The theoretical and theological must become experiential – on that the Word is clear.

Nikola Tesla, inventor of the radio, said, “I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success…  Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”   —from the “Flash of Genius” movie website. Guess what.  It was. How far would you go to protect your intellectual property?  How strongly would you insist that credit be given where credit is due—especially by those who are benefiting from your invention?  What are you to do when you’re in a battle contending for what is right while your personal world crumbles around you?  “Flash of Genius” raises these questions and then gives us one man’s answers. The title comes from an old U.S. patent law which said that in order to be granted a patent, the inventor had to be able to show that “the inventive act had to come into the mind in a ‘flash of genius’ and not as a result of tinkering.” (“Flash of Genius,” wikipedia) For Bob Kearns, his flash of genius for the intermittent windshield wiper came on his wedding night when he hit himself in the eye with a champagne cork, and got to thinking about how the eye blinks only when it needs moisture, and then later, while driving in the rain, wondered what if there was a windsheild wiper that could behave like the human eye. [SPOILER ALERT, KIND OF:]  There is a powerful courtroom scene where the defense, Ford Motor Company, calls an engineer to the stand to testify that Kearns didn’t really invent the intermittent windshield wiper because he didn’t create anything you couldn’t buy at your local electronics store.  All he did, the engineer explains, was arrange those basic over-the-counter pieces in a particular order. In his cross examination, Kearns produces a copy of Dicken’s “Tale of Two Cities,” reads the opening sentence “They were the best of times.  They were the worst of times…” and then goes word by word through that sentence asking the engineer if Dickens created any of those words. No, all he did was arrange them. So can Dickens really expect to take credit for writing that book?  Kearns goes on to say this is usually the essence of the creative process, of invention—taking the pieces we have available to us at the time and arranging them in a unique and effective way so as the create something new. This scene made my heart swell with emotion.  I love words.  And I love their power when arranged well.  And to hear Kearns make this point in the film reminded me again that the work of inventing or creating art is such a spiritual endeavour—taking simple words made up of simple letters and arranging them in such a way as to stir the heart of another person.  That, my friends, is evidence that we are so much more than organic tissue matter. With regards to this part of the story, I thought the content on invention and how the creative process was recognized by the patent office was fascinating.  Anyone who creates or invents will find this engaging as well, I think. I’m not going to say “Flash of Genius” is a perfect film.  It isn’t.  It’s kind of slow.  But you don’t watch a movie like this in hopes of seeing action.  You watch for the story, and with regards to this film, you get two stories with two outcomes for the price of one—the story of Bob Kearns’ legal wrangling over his right to credit and compensation for the wiper, and the demolition of his marriage in the process.  That first story is the obvious one, the second is told between the lines, and then hauntingly by a look on Bob’s face just before the credits begin to roll. I bring this film to the Rabbit Room table because I know a lot of the readers and contributors of this blog make their living by drawing an income from intellectual property—stuff they thought up.  And we’ve had a lot of conversations here about the artist’s right to compensation.  This film adds another dimension to the discussion– the artist’s obligations to the peole in his or her life. Much has been made over the past decade or so about illegally obtaining someone’s intellectual property on the internet (usually relating to music and film) without acknowledging or compensating them for it.  It is a new form of stealing, essentially having the same impact on an artist as if you stole their CD from the shelves at Best Buy and somehow made it past the usually hulking dude with the ear piece standing at the door trying to make eye contact with you to determine your guilt or innocence.  This story is about a wrong being done to someone by someone else. But what about the other story—the one where the artist, musician, writer, pastor, teacher, manager, clerk or name-your-vocation-here pursues their right to be recognized to the detriment and sometimes even destruction of their family, friendships, health, etc?  What about the carnage left in the wake of the one who will not stop their pursuit, even though it means they’re becoming a stranger to their spouse, kids, even to themselves? This seems to be the whirlwind any of us could reap if we’re not careful.  We can get so engrossed in our craft that we see little else around us, even the people we live with.  Meanwhile one marriage after another withers and dies in the process.  What about that part of the story. There are several times in the film when Ford offers to settle with Kearns (and their offers are very substantial), but since none of those settlements include giving him credit for his invention, he turns them down flat.  But his family is thinking that beside the obvious financial windfall, if they took the settlement they would be able to move on with their lives. Bob cannot do this.  And his reason is that what Ford is doing is just plain wrong.  He can’t let them get away with running roughshod over the little guy.  It is a clear matter of right and wrong, he explains. And as he brings the fight to Ford while his family falls apart, we’re left to wonder which is the greater wrong?  What is the right thing for Kearns to do?  How do we live, work and love so that we don’t have to choose our vocation over our marriage or our ideals over our present committments? These are the questions “Flash of Genius” raises, leaving them for the viewer to answer.  Thoughts?

If you haven’t heard the news yet, Randall Goodgame’s new album, Bluebird, officially releases today. About six weeks ago, as they were nearing the end of the recording process, Randall asked if I would write some string arrangements for it. I thought I’d write a little about the process here, for those interested in seeing behind the scenes. (I’ll leave a song-by-song commentary for someone else (Curt?) saying only that it’s a great record, from the opening downbeat to the last B3 organ chord.) At first, Randall, Quinlan (the producer) and Winn (Randall’s manager and the B3 player on the record) wanted strings on just one song, California. After Andy Osenga added electric guitar parts to the existing tracks of bass, drums, keys, and vocals, they sent me an mp3 of a rough mix. And over the next day and half, I wrote the string parts. When I finished, I created an mp3 of a string mockup using some of the string samples I have on my computer and sent it to them. After they’d had a chance to listen to it, we decided to postpone the string session (which was scheduled for that evening) so that we could make some changes to the arrangement. They felt that what I had written gave the song too much of an orchestral feel, but that that style of orchestration would fit perfectly on another song, All the Years. So a couple days later, I met with the producer to talk about the kind of arrangement he wanted for California, and then started rewriting it that afternoon. (He’s a fan of Bjork and wanted it to sound a little like the string arrangements on her albums, so I downloaded her ’97 album, Homogenic – she describes it as featuring “beats, strings and voice” – from iTunes and listened during breaks from writing throughout the rest of the day.) After I finished the arrangement for California, about 7:00 that evening, I started in on the chart for All the Years. I had rescheduled the string session for 10:00 the next morning, since we were already a little behind schedule for when the album needed to be mixed and ready for mastering, so I knew it would be a long night. The first time I heard All the Years I fell in love with it – it’s always nice when your work and the music you love match up. The song starts with Randall expressing his weariness of long years on the road, his desire to be with his love. In the chorus, he sings, “Take me away, take me away, my love. Can you find me a road I’ve never known? Take me away, take me away, my love. I’m tired, can you just take me home?” When Quinlan and I were talking about the song earlier in the day, he said he wanted the strings to evoke that sense of longing for home, of homesickness. So throughout the evening, with the lyrics running through my head, I kept remembering the numerous passages Buechner has written about home, our efforts to find that place we remember from our childhood or perhaps to create the home we never had. I thought of the passages from Andrew’s novel, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, that express that longing for home so poignantly (see the comments on this post). And I did my best to try to convey that feeling with the strings, trying to match the range of emotions in Randall’s voice, from the almost desperate pleading in the bridge to the fragile, broken petition in the last chorus.  I finished writing the arrangement a little after 4:00 in the morning, (helped along by a couple large cappuccinos,) got a couple hours of sleep, then printed the parts and headed out the door to hear the Love Sponge string quartet play what I’d been hearing in my head. For the last couple weeks, Randall has been offering All the Years as a free download on his website. You can listen to it below, click here to download it, or buy the full EP in the Rabbit Room Store today.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/AllTheYears.mp3

The tour ended a few days ago.  Josh and I rolled up the long gravel driveway to our house at about 1:30 am after having covered eleven states and almost 5,000 miles.  Jamie had left the pumpkins lit and the porch light on, and my little house on the hill looked as warm and comforting as a poundcake fresh out of the oven. I walked around the yard for a while, looked at the stars, said a few words to Moondog, whose tail thumped lazily on the porch wood, and thanked God in Heaven that I was home. I wasn’t home for long, though.  I had to get up in about six hours and visit a wonderful school to play the children a few songs and read a chapter from On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness.  I was sleepy, but seeing all those little boys and girls hugging my book to their chests was well worth it.  The next night was Halloween, and after the kids went trick-or-treating (Aedan and Asher as Clone Troopers, Skye as the most adorable spider you ever did see), we lit a fire in the chimnea outside and ate chili with good friends while the kids stuffed their faces. After being gone for weeks, I was giddy at the memories being made, the sweetness of the homestead, the sound of the kids giggling; all my roadweariness evaporated.  I saw the moon lifting over the junipers and hackberry trees and sighed.  I commented that everything was just about perfect, and I wondered aloud who would soon be going to the hospital.  I was chastised for the cynical remark, and I confess I have a habit of waiting for the other boot to drop.  Well, in about three hours I found myself in the emergency room, pressing a towel to the side of my bleeding head. I was breaking a branch for the fire, and when I kicked it the long end flew up and whacked me in the ear.  It gashed me in one place and cut my earlobe clean in two.  I got seventeen stitches.  I’m not complaining, really.  Even as I bled on the way to the ER I appreciated that it would make for a good story.  And you know me, I’m a sucker for a good story. Anyway, the next morning I left for yet another show, this time with Andys Gullahorn and Osenga.  It was a great time, but somewhere between Canton, Georgia and Nashville I reached the threshold of my car-travel endurance.  After the tour, then a hospital visit, then another four hour drive for Saturday’s show, I was officially finished traveling.  I wanted to go home, and that’s all I wanted to do. I got in late last night and crawled into bed, thankful beyond thankful that I only have one show this month before the Christmas tour begins. So what did we do today?  We rushed out the door for church, drove about five minutes, then turned around.  We decided that instead of church we’d drive to the Smoky Mountains to see Tennessee in all its autumnal glory. We packed a change of clothes, and drove four hours east into the mountains.  That’s right.  More driving.  But this was different.  This was with my two boys and my sweet daughter.  This was with my bride.  We read stories aloud in the car and stopped for candy at the Shell station.  We talked in funny accents and listed the top five things we hoped to do before we died (Aedan said he wanted to visit Sweden; Asher said he wanted to dig a tunnel to the center of the earth; Skye giggled and chewed her gum).  We walked the sidewalks of Gatlinburg in light jackets and marveled at how red a maple leaf can be.  We listened to the bluegrass band play Rocky Top at 78 rpm.  We ate caramel apples. The last thing I wanted to do today was sit for one more minute in the car, or to travel to another city that wasn’t Nashville.  I’m writing this from a little motel, hours from the Warren.  But with these children and this wife in my company, the world can spin anyway it wants to and my home will glide atop it like a gull on the water.

Artists are passion people. To feel passionately about things seems to be a prerequisite to the creation of most art forms, maybe music especially. So on the eve of our latest election, I thought I’d ask you all for your favorite political, social, or protest songs – the good, the bad, and the ugly. It could be songs you love, or songs you hate. It could be social commentary like “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell, or it could be more direct like “The Great American Novel” by Larry Norman or… well… just about anything by Derek Webb. I’d love to hear why you thought the songs you picked worked or even ones you thought were lame. For instance, I LOVE Sting’s Sacred Love record – until he gets to his political song. Then it’s “Skip” and I’m on to the next track. His poetic brilliance degrades into a whiny incendiary diatribe and I just want him to get back to his singing songs that make me feel like making out with my wife. But in general I like political songs, or songs that carry ultimate social ideas, and have always thought that this is one of the roles of music – to bring cultural change, to be prophetic. So what are some songs you think hit the mark? Are there any that you feel totally missed the mark? Does Springsteen or Dave Matthews stumping for Democrats color the rest of their music in a negative or positive way? Why do the liberals get all the cool musicians and conservatives have to make do with Billy Ray Cyrus. Should musicians stump for candidates at all? And finally, what I want to know is where is former governor of MN Jesse “The Body” Ventura when we need him most? I’m hoping that naming our favorite political songs can hopefully lead to a discussion of all this and more. I’d love to hear from you! Even if you hate political songs, let me know about that. Here are four that I’ve always loved (though you don’t have to name four if you don’t want to): The Great American Novel – Larry Norman Somehow Norman manages to offend everyone and writes a song that is one of the most culturally relevant of it’s time in the 70’s – addressing hypocrisy, racism, the vietnam war, privacy, and even the space program – without ever coming off as “religious” in the worst sense of the word. It’s still eerily relevant some 30 years later. Here’s a lyric: When I was ten you murdered law with courtroom politics and you learned to make a lie sound just like truth but I know you better now and I don’t fall for all your tricks and you’ve lost the one advantage of my youth you kill a black man at midnight just for talking to your daughter then you make his wife your mistress and you leave her without water and the sheet you wear upon your face is the sheet your children sleep on at every meal you say a prayer you don’t believe but still you keep on and your money says in God we trust but it’s against the law to pray in school you say we beat the Russians to the moon and I say you starved your children to do it you are far across the ocean in a war that’s not your own and while you’re winning theirs you’re gonna lose the one at home do you really think the only way to bring about the peace is to sacrifice your children and kill all your enemies the politicians all make speeches while the news men all take note and they exaggerate the issues as they shove them down our throats is it really up to them whether this country sinks or floats well I wonder who would lead us if none of us would vote well my phone is tapped and my lips are chapped from whispering through the fence you know every move I make or is that just coincidence… …you say all men are equal all men are brothers then why are the rich more equal than others don’t ask me for the answer I’ve only got one that a man leaves his darkness when he follows the Son Watch Larry perform this song here A King And A Kingdom – Derek Webb Potent convicting lyrics from one of the most prophetic voices of our time. What I love about Derek is his protests aren’t angry rants, but there is always the sense that no matter how pointed his observations are, they are born out of a deep love for the people he’s singing to. my first allegiance is not to a flag, a country, or a man my first allegiance is not to democracy or blood it’s to a king & a kingdom… And the best part of the song: …but nothing unifies like a common enemy and we’ve got one, sure as hell but he may be living in your house he may be raising up your kids he may be sleeping with your wife oh no, he may not look like you think Listen to “A King & A Kingdom” here If A Song Could Be President – Over The Rhine I just thought this song was good clean fun and an ode to the kind of artist’s that Karen and Linford love. The song weakens the more critical it gets of a specific leader, but all in all I think it’s kind of charming. sample lyric: If a song could be president We’d hum on Election Day The gospel choir would start to sway And we’d all have a part to play The first lady would free her hips Pull a microphone to her lips Break our hearts with Rhythm and Blues Steve Earle would anchor the news… ..We’d make Neil Young a Senator Even though he came from Canada Emmylou would be Ambassador World leaders would listen to her They would show us where our country went wrong Strum their guitars on the White House lawn John Prine would run the FBI All the criminals would laugh and cry If a song could be president Listen to it here And of course, “Born In The USA” by Springsteen – the most subversive chest thumping patriotic anthem to ever grace the airwaves. Most people don’t get it, and it’s amazing how the song manages to work on so many levels – and with one simple riff that repeats all the way through! How did he do that? Okay, who’s next? Evie “Me, me, pick me (hand in air waving frantically) for president!” Coates AAAAHHHHH!!! Me, me, pick me!! (hand in air, waving frantically.) Ahem. Evie’s hands-down, very-most-favored political song: “Christ for President” by Billy Bragg and Wilco from the “Mermaid Avenue” record. I should clarify, for those who are not familiar with this album, that all of the songs’ lyrics were written by American legend, humanitarian and philanthrope, Woody Guthrie. Billy Bragg and Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco fame, got their hands on them (from Woody’s daughter, I believe) and put them to music. It’s pure genius, the lot of it. If you’ve never heard this song, it’s a twangy, noisy romp lead by Jeff Tweedy’s scratchy vocal touting our Lord and Savior’s political platform. I LOVE it. There’s a plinky, rough-edged little piano bridge that pleases my ears and brings to mind an old saloon player. I wish there were a music video of this tune. With no further muss or fuss, I give you….. “Christ for President” Let’s have Christ our President Let us have him for our king Cast your vote for the Carpenter That they call the Nazarene The only way We could ever beat These crooked politician men Is to cast the moneychangers Out of the temple Put the Carpenter in Oh it’s Jesus Christ our President God above our king With a job and pension for young and old We will make hallelujah ring Every year we waste enough To feed the ones who starve We build our civilization up And we shoot it down with wars But with the Carpenter On the seat Way up in the capitol town The USA Be on the way Prosperity bound Eric “politics schmolitics” Peters I don’t come from a politically active family – even though my dad watches CSPAN all night long – so I’ve never really grown to embrace politics on the whole. I’ve never embraced a whole politician either. Nor has one stolen candy from my baby. But either way, I don’t much care for political songs. They bore me. To be completely forthright, however, I must admit that I actually wrote my first politically-tinged song sometime after the 5th anniversary of 9/11. It will theoretically be on my new album which I’m now slowly working on. In it, I’m not really shaking a finger at any one particular person, but it’s about as feisty as I get. Which isn’t much. I hope it’s not a rude song. Or boring, for that matter. I doubt I’ve answered your question. I’m usually turned off when music tries to go political but I think I can squeeze out a few favorites. 1- Sunday, Bloody Sunday – U2 – I love this song, such awesome drums. The thing that really elevates it to greatness for me is the live version in the Rattle and Hum movie. Bono’s speech in that song (at about 3:40 in the link) is just spectacular. 2- What’s Going On – Marvin Gaye – Does this one really need explanation? All I can say is that I love his music (I’m a sucker for some Motown) and this is one of those songs that never gets skipped when it comes up in the playlist. (And for kicks) 3- Jerusalem – Matisyahu – Who knew Jews could do reggae? Heck, I don’t even like reggae but I’m just bonkers about this song, it’s so bizarre. Consider it the musical analog to Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Runners up – We Ain’t Gonna Take It (Twisted Sister) is sorta political…kinda, a whole slew of stuff by the Boss that I passed over since we’ve talked about all that recently, and Zombie by The Cranberries because I once blew some speakers in my car listening to that song too loud. Love the topic and the idea. And my choices are fairly easy: -A King and a Kingdom, D. Webb -Big Yellow Taxi, J. Mitchell -Empire, Queensryche (takes me back to my hair metal days) Next to love songs, protest songs are probably the largest category in popular music. At it’s heart, the act of songwriting is fundamentally a form of protest. In the solitary act of committing pen to paper, the songwriter passionately affirms that his scralls deserve a louder voice. He hopes to raise awareness, if even within himself. Many protest songs are utterly predictable. As Hollywood movies lean left, so protest songs lean left. Before we hear note one or word one, we know this to be true. “Grunt, left good, right bad.” “Grunt, peace good, war bad.” “Duh-ayyy, government good, individual bad.” “Grunt, grunt, wealth bad, unless it is distributed equally among everyone.” “Duh-ayyy.” So when I consider great protest songs, my number one criteria is that they have a brain. So many protest songs dutifully take and regurgitate the Luden’s Cherry Cough Drops as divvied out by left wing propagandists. It’s a deceptive pill to swallow: looks good, sounds good, seems good, tastes good, feels good, but doesn’t make you well. The best protest songs smartly communicate nuance and subtlety. Further, these songs communicate something bigger and more transcendent than expedient political solutions. The best protest songs advocate solutions within, not without. With those benchmarks in mind, here’s three of my favorite protest songs: 1. “Revolution” by the Beatles – You say you’ve got a real solution, well you know we’d all love to see the plan. (I like the sarcasm.) You ask me for a contribution well you know we’re all doing what we can. But if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you is brother you have to wait. These lyrics readily acknowledge that despite the truth that most of us want the same ends—when it comes to politics—there is more than one way to get there. The transcendent part comes in the hook, when John (Can there be any doubt that John wrote this one?) writes, You know it’s going to be all right. On a trivial note, the Beatles achieved that dirty guitar sound–which some rock and roll historians call the earliest precursor to heavy metal–by plugging the electric guitars directly into the recording console. 2. “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye – It’s not a coincidence that the title track from the most spiritual of albums from Marvin Gaye came at a time of great personal crisis. Gaye had fallen into a debilitating depression after his singing partner—Motown artist Tammi Terrell—died of a brain tumor. For a long time, Gaye refused to record or perform. “What’s Going On” advocates dialogue over dogma: Picket lines and picket signs, Don’t punish me with brutality Talk to me, so you can see Oh, what’s going on What’s going on Using the words, “mother,” “father,” and “brother,” to me implicitely communicate that change begins at home; in the family and in individual hearts. The rest of the album has an overtly spiritual flavor as well including the Marvin Gaye penned, “God Is Love.” 3. “Blowin’ in the Wind” – Bob Dylan – In 4th grade music class, the cooler than cool Mrs. Steifel came up with the innovative idea of letting the class pick its own music from the world of pop music rather than those horrible kid anthems. It’s one of my earliest memories of being conscious of lyrics. Mrs. Steifel insisted that we sing the songs well, so we practiced them over and over and over again, eventually committing the lyrics to memory. Dylan ask a series of rhetorical questions, with the reply to each one of them, The answer is blowin’ in the wind. In light of Dylan’s later conversion the Yes,’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail, before she sleeps in the sand? is especially poignant and poetic, as is the title, “The Answer is Blowin’ in the Wind.” I like to think of that wind as The Spirit Wind. The song is by most accounts, an anti-war song. But by leaving the lyrics satisfyingly ambiguous, Dylan left the final interpretation up to the listener. Thanks, Bob. (Can I call you, Bob?) Honorable mention goes to “Okie from Muskogee” by Merle Haggard and “When the President Talks to God” by Bright Eyes. I am not a particular fan of either tune, but I like the level of passion in both. And I want to hear them back to back on the radio someday. “The Times, They Are a-Changin'” by Bob Dylan. On the tour last week I spent about four hours in the car listening to old Bob Dylan songs, and was once again floored. When this one came up it felt as prophetic and timely as it must have back in the 60’s when he wrote it: The line it is drawn The curse it is cast The slow one now Will later be fast As the present now Will later be past The order is Rapidly fadin’. And the first one now Will later be last For the times they are a-changin’. Oh, and I just thought of another, by my favorite rock and roll band from the nineties, Tesla.  That’s right, I said Tesla.  They were a hair band, but they really stood out among their effeminate peers by not wearing makeup or tight leather pants.  And, they actually sang songs about things.  The very name of the band, for example, isn’t a city in Oklahoma (really, I had to explain that more than once in high school), but the oft-overlooked inventor of A/C power and the radio (it wasn’t Marconi, contrary to the textbooks), Nikola Tesla.  The inventor’s sad and fascinating story is hinted at several times in their songs and album titles.  I say all that to say, I just remembered this song.  It ain’t terribly deep, but it’s a welcome lyrical departure from, say, “Unskinny Bop”, by Poison, or “Up All Night”, by Slaughter. (I’m not suggesting that you go and download the song, by the way, even though its guitar part makes me want to raise my pinky and index finger.  I’m not sure I’d be able to stand it anymore.  But here it is.) Modern Day Cowboy Stormy night under jet black skies, Billy pulls into town the thunder rolled and the lightning bolts come crashin’ to the ground Cold as ice, hard as stone, as he walks into the room With another man who was feeling the same way, all hell’s breakin’ loose Bang bang, shoot ’em up, bang bang, blow you away It’s a showdown in the no man’s land, for the cowboy of the modern day Come sundown, don’t be hangin’ round, ’cause the cowboy’ll blow you away Al Capone and the Bad Boy Jones, on the wrong side of the law Johnny D and his company, always first to the draw, Gangster lean, feelin’ so mean, try to take more than their share ‘Cause all they saw was ruling it all, the scent of blood was in the air So here we are and we’ve come this far, but it’s only getting worse Foreign lands with their terrorist demands, only cause the good to hurt The U.S.A., the U.S.S.R., with their six-guns at their side I see the message, written on the wall, too much anger deep inside Bang bang, shoot ’em up, bang bang, blow you away There’s also my other favorite nineties rock and roll band, Extreme, whose songs were usually brilliant political and social satire disguised as delightfully melodic, riff-heavy rock.  I have a great story about a few conversations I had with Extreme’s frontman Gary Cherone about his Christian faith. And finally, I’ll mention the late great Rich Mullins, whose first record featured this diamond in the rough.  I’ve sung it to myself more than once over the last few months: Save Me Save me, save me Save me from my contempt for the things that make me strong Save me from any value I could put a price tag on Save me from Soviet propagandists Lord save me from Washington Please save me Lord save me Save me save me Save me from the slick pop sounds Laid down in virgin vinyl grooves Save me from any woman who would be turned On to the aftershave I use Save me from trendy religion that makes Cheap cliches out of timeless truths Lord save me, Please save me Save me One of my favorite “state of the union” songs is Joni Mitchell’s “Sex Kills.” It’s not exactly a hopeful song, more a song about the present state of the fallen world we live in – a world of dashed hopes. I always find it interesting that people with Joni’s mindset start out as idealists and eventually become cynics. George Carlin once said, “A cynic is just a disappointed idealist.” After forty years of banging on the doors of “The Establishment” idealists are tortured by the fallen nature of man, something they don’t want to believe in. They start with faith, and that faith is shipwrecked because it isn’t in a holy God but in fallen man. I listen mostly to Joni’s more idealistic music, the earlier stuff, though I love her whole catalog. The end of all nature will the ideal envisioned by God, who sees the end from the beginning. That ideal-ism is the true realism. The production on this song is perfect. Eerie, captivating, repetitive, moody, brooding – and sadly resigned. Sex Kills I pulled up behind a Cadillac; We were waiting for the light; And I took a look at his license plate- It said, “Just Ice.” Is justice just ice? Governed by greed and lust? Just the strong doing what they can And the weak suffering what they must? And the gas leaks And the oil spills And sex sells everything And sex kills … Sex kills … Doctors’ pills give you brand new ills And the bills bury you like an avalanche And lawyers haven’t been this popular Since Robespierre slaughtered half of France! And Indian chiefs with their old beliefs know The balance is undone-crazy ions- You can feel it out in traffic; Everyone hates everyone! And the gas leaks And the oil spills And sex sells everything And sex kills … Sex kills … All these jackoffs at the office The rapist in the pool Oh and the tragedies in the nurseries- Little kids packin’ guns to school The ulcerated ozone These tumors of the skin- This hostile sun beating down on This massive mess we’re in! And the gas leaks And the oil spills And sex sells everything And sex kills … Sex kills … Sex kills … Sex kills … Sex kills … Jason— What a question! My favorite political song? I can only think of least-favorite political songs. For me, at least, art that is easily recognizable as “political” art already has a strike or two against it, whether I agree with its politics or not. Wendell Berry’s novels are very political. But the politics sneak up on you. You finish and say, “Hey, wait a minute, I just read a very political book!” I’m trying to think of a song that does the same thing. If I could, that would be my favorite political song. Since I can’t, here are two nominees: 1. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” As political songs go, that’s a great one. From what I understand, it was quite effective in accomplishing its political aims. It started out life as the crudely political “John Brown’s Body Lies a-Moldering in the Grave,” before Julia Ward Howe changed the words. Her use of prophetic language (“He is trampling out the vineyard where the grapes of wrath are stored”) brings the transcendent to bear on the political. I gained a new appreciation of its power when I went to a men’s prayer lunch on Sept 12, 2001—the day after the terrorist attacks—and a couple of hundred men sang it—with almost too much gusto. 2. Ben Shive’s “4th of July.” Does that count as a political song? Really, it’s a self-consciously a-political song. The last stanza: This nation, indivisible Will perish from the Earth As surely as the leaves must change and fall And the band will end the anthem To dust she will return So the sun must set on all things, great and small But the first star of the evening Will outlive them all Honorable Mention: “Sweet Home Alabama.” The politics may be distasteful (Is “Watergate does not bother me” supposed to make me feel better about the segregationist Alabama of that era?)—but I suspect I’m not the only one around here with a soft spot for that song. A few years ago I was in Scotland at a village music festival. One of the bands struck up those first few licks of “Sweet Home Alabama,” and the crowd went nuts. p.s. Jason, I disagree with you about Over the Rhine’s “If a Song Could be President.” It’s clever enough, but I think it’s easily the least compelling song on that otherwise brilliant CD. It’s a perfect example of why I don’t like political songs. Two genius song-writers go flat when they turn their attention to political questions. ———————————————————————– Marvin Gaye – What’s goin on? It is not profound, but it is killer. And that makes me think of the Marvin Gaye national anthem… here it is… Father, father, everybody thinks we’re wrong Oh, but who are they to judge us Simply because our hair is long

My friend posted a quote the other day that has me thinking (although it should have me “doing”). I’ve actually read this a couple times but now, more than ever, I am considering the implications and whether or not I agree. Then I thought the Rabbit Room is a perfect place for such an excerpt: The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand it, we must act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. ~Soren Kierkegaard Thoughts? #SorenKierkegaard

My first career was radio broadcasting. My big break came when I was hired as the all night guy at 59/WOW Omaha. That era was the tail end of the glory days for music on AM radio. With 5,000 watts and a favorable dial position, our signal blasted into Canada, seven or eight states, and with the skywave signal during my shift in the middle of the night, sometimes more. With high profile promotions and good ratings, it was a heady time for a small town boy of nineteen. I was the all night Jeff Spencer. A big part of my motivation for choosing radio as a career was music—choosing it, playing it, and living it. In retrospect, the late 70s weren’t really the glory days of rock and roll, but I still have many good memories and I’ll admit it—I thought the music was pretty good. I appreciate the way that music anchors memories with a vivid association. Like Pavlov’s dog, the feelings attached to those memories come rushing back when those old songs are played.  With many songs I can tell you where I was, what I was doing, what I felt, and what I was thinking when I first heard them. I’ve always been a lyrics man. Is it any wonder that Andrew Peterson became my favorite artist? I like a great radio hook as much as the next person, but an artist with a flair for writing great lyrics almost always has my ear. When it became commonplace for record companies to remaster and release music on CD, that was initially released on vinyl, especially those that hit big prior to 1980, I started buying up a lot of the albums I listened to and played on the radio (not necessarily the same thing). I could have spent my money wiser because I rarely listen to that old stuff anymore. I know some of you will understand when I say that it just felt good knowing that I had it. Like the musical equivalent of money in the bank, I could simply pull it out when I needed it or wanted to have a little fun. In the early days of CDs, who would have thought that most genres of music—even crap—would later be widely available? I think I had a low-grade fear that I might never see some of that stuff again—and just wanted to preserve my copy. Like a willing and able butler at our beck and call, the world wide web has evolved into nearly whatever we want it to be. I particularly relish the way in which it serves as a massive archive, a never ending literal musical repository. Whether it’s auction sites, Amazon, artist and record company websites, down-loads, iTunes, myspace, Virb, YouTube and so much more—it appears my fear of obsolescence was unfounded. Apparently, the music will live on. Anyway, I’m rambling; I’ll get to the point. For no particular reason, I dug out The Best of England Dan and John Ford Coley (I know, I know) a few weeks ago. Blessings sometimes come to us quite serendipitously. It was fun singing along to “Nights Are Forever,” “Gone Too Far,” “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight,” and “We’ll Never Have to Say Goodbye Again,” but when “Love is the Answer” came up in rotation, a #1 hit on the Adult Contemporary charts in 1979, it was like I was pierced by an unexpected arrow. It was a puncture that was sharp and quick, somewhere between pleasure and pain, blood and tears. I was a little shocked to be moved by something so familiar and linear. After all, over 25 years ago I’d memorized the lyric and sang along hundreds of times. I don’t necessarily mean to imply that “Love is the Answer” is a particularly great song though I can’t deny liking the song. In fact, England Dan and John Ford Coley used two annoying instrumental devices that permeated the radio waves in that era: the artificial sounding electric piano, and the saxophone. But despite the once trendy, now archaic musical vibe, the strength of the lyrics still reached out and grabbed me by the chest. The song was written by Todd Rundgren—a pretty good songwriter many would agree. I played and sang “Love is the Answer” hundreds of times, every 2 1/2 hours every day during my air shift alone. I casually remember thinking of it as another ubiquitous good-bye song, disposable pop music, and on some level, that’s what it is. I don’t remember being captivated by the obvious spiritual connotations.  But isn’t that the truth about life? Better yet, isn’t that true about the way God often instructs us, revealing important truths in places we least expect to find them, even in the middle of a cheesy old pop song? I doubt that I expected to find anything of value. So I didn’t. Until recently. Indeed, in my lens of forty something eyes, I heard a different song this time—one that brought me close to tears, both for myself and my fellow man. Sometimes the ostensibly commonplace is so common, if there is something of beauty to be discovered, it can’t be placed. I was bowled over by it’s heretofore camouflaged message—a simple, yet profound message that our Lord proclaims incessantly: LOVE IS THE ANSWER (I AM THE ANSWER). It is, of course, His primary message. And yet, in an age when a beer commercial  or political debate is often more apt to capture our attention than the Still Small Voice, that fundamental message gets lost in the obnoxious jungle of modern culture. We may behave as an adults with a veneers of confidence, happiness, and material stuff. Still, we walk the path of homeless, lonely, itinerant beings. The Henry David Thoreau quote about, “The mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation,” seems more true now than ever. Sadly, the world averts it’s collective eyes as we walk on by. Yes we care, but we are nursing our own hurts, and reaching out is risky business. And we are in a hurry. We are busy. The Bible is clear. As believers, we are new creatures. As His children, we can find hope and joy. Walking in Him, we bask in peace that passes all understanding. In Him, we can do all things from the strength which He alone provides. Yes, we are complete TODAY. It’s not a tall tale, this Christianity thing. Still, the place in which we find ourselves right now, is literally down to earth. We aren’t Home yet. It’s sometimes painfully obvious. Having tasted the joy of Jesus, it’s almost as if by contrast—when God is silent, when Tsunami comes, when an elderly loved one endures the winter of their lives with unbearable pain and purpose that is hard to unearth, when missing friends that are scattered about, when tossed about like styrofoam on a hurricane ravaged sea only to be pulled underwater at the very moment our stregth seems expended—when we lean on our own understanding for any of this, it’s then I realize how much I long to be a child again—in the arms of my Lord. Is that you, Lord, telling me to keep on walking towards home? “Love is the Answer” Name your price A ticket to paradise I can’t stay here any more And I’ve looked high and low I’ve been from shore to shore to shore If there’s a short cut I’d have found it But there is no easy way around it Light of the world, shine on me, Love is the answer Shine on us all Set us free Love is the answer Who knows why Someday we all must die We’re all homeless boys and girls And we are never heard It’s such a lonely world People turn their heads And walk on by Tell me is it worth just another try Are we alive Or just a dying planet? What are the chances? Ask the man in your heart for the answers And when you feel afraid Love one another When you’ve lost your way Love one another And when you’re all alone Love one another And when you’re far from home Love one another And when you’re down and out Love one another And when your hopes run out Love one another And when you need a friend Love one another We got to love one another

I have a memory burned into my mind of one of the last times I talked to my father – this was shortly after my parents’ separation after 25 years of marriage and just before God told him to kill me, my siblings, and my mom. We were standing in the nearly bare dining room of the house I grew up in, a room filled to overflowing with good memories from my childhood, memories of laughter and safe places and love. The only items in the room were my old stereo system that was left behind because it only worked half the time, sitting on the floor to my left, a cluttered desk in the corner across from me, and a folding table set up in the middle of the room, where the dining room table used to sit, piled high with several weeks worth of mail and old newspapers. I was desperately searching for something to say, something that might make him reconsider his actions and attitudes, and I realized I didn’t have any memories of him ever having any close friends, no one who knew his secrets. And so I tried to ask him about it, and then blurted out a quote from John Donne, “No man is an island.” Caught off guard, he stammered for a moment, and then came out with, “Yes, yes he is.” And I was left with nothing else to say. In the chapter “Presidents I Have Known,” in his new book The Yellow Leaves, Frederick Buechner writes about seeing Franklin D. Roosevelt when he was a boy. “Even all these years later I can still remember the moment when the double doors of the elevator rumbled softly apart and there was Franklin D. Roosevelt framed in the wide opening. He was standing between two men, the taller of whom, my mother whispered, was one of his sons. Each of them had hold of him under one of his arms, and I could see that if they let go of him, he would crumple to the ground on legs as flimsy as the legs of the Sleepy Sam dolls in their seersucker pajamas that Jamie and I took to bed with us at night. He was the most important man in the Mayflower Hotel. He was the most important man in the world. But I could see with my own eyes that if he didn’t have those two men to help, he would be helpless.” Buechner continues that story about Roosevelt a couple pages later, after writing about his father’s suicide when he was ten years old. “What I learned for the first time from that glimpse I had of him in the elevator is that even the mightiest among us can’t stand on our own. Unless we have someone to hold us, our flimsy legs buckle. My father made his way down the two flights of stairs as quietly as he could, [turned on the Chevy,] then sat on the running board and waited. When he was discovered an hour or so later that morning, he was crumbled over like Sleepy Sam.” It’s hard – damn hard sometimes – to share who you are with those close to you, especially at the end of a long week, a hard month. It’s less work, or so we try to tell ourselves, to keep it bottled inside, to pretend we don’t have struggles or doubts or frustrations. To try and hide that there are times when it takes every ounce of strength we have to keep holding on to hope, to believe in something more. But the cost of hiding ourselves is too great, both to ourselves and to those around us. We must, for no less reason than the sake of our very souls, acknowledge that we cannot make it on our own. So help us, God.

I saw an invigorating concert tonight.  I was blessed to be surrounded by some of my favorite people in the world.  I sat next to Jill Phillips, Andy Gullahorn, and Don Chaffer (Waterdeep, Enter The Worship Circle) as the Art Music Justice tour unfolded before us – an artful combination of music, images, media, the Word of God, and the call to remember the poorest of the poor.  The tour was the brain-child (or perhaps heart child is more appropriate here) of Troy & Sara Groves and featured guests Charlie Peacock, Derek Webb, Sandra McCracken, and Brandon Heath. I could talk at length about the performances – the way that Sandra McCracken all but channeled Emmy Lou Harris, Derek’s delightful crankiness, how well newcomer Brandon Heath held his own on stage with veterans like Charlie and Sara, the wisdom and authority that Charlie brought, and of course Sara’s disarming passion that is at once humble and emphatic.  I could talk at length about the artistry of the evening – the musicianship, the artwork displayed in the sanctuary and on the screen, the flow of the evening.  I could even talk in depth about the effective way that the ministries of Blood Water Mission, Food For The Hungry, and International Justice Mission were presented.  But it’s difficult to parse all these things out because they are all a part of the whole that made the AMJ tour so special. When Sara was working on her last record that centered on themes of social justice, I was concerned for her – there are a lot of opportunities for that kind of material that when set to music can come off the tracks and fall either in the ditch of preachiness or the ditch of melodrama.  Her album successfully avoided these pitfalls and is a richly layered exploration of hope and responsibility.  These are the hardest kinds of songs to write and she pulled it off, making it sound easy. A risky album would likely call for a risky tour, and I remember a conversation I had with Troy Groves last Spring about their Fall tour plans and how they wanted to do this thing, but they couldn’t figure out how to make it work financially.  But they felt like it was right, so they were moving ahead with it, trusting that God would provide.  And move ahead they did, and the hundreds gathered in Franklin tonight including myself are grateful. I’ve been in and around the industry for a number of years, and you come to accept the business nature of the gospel music business – with it’s agendas, posturing, and bottom line mentality – though it does wear on your enthusiasm after a while.  Sometimes it can look like a lot of people trying to build their own kingdom. What was remarkable about the AMJ concert was it’s insistent focus on the Kingdom of God and what it means to pray, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  The music was amazing, the line-up of artists was incredible, the media presentations were cool, but the truth is all of these things were virtually invisible.  I would venture to say that even though the emphasis was on the poor, even this was secondary in the end. I think hope was the star of the show.  Hope for the poor, yes, but also hope that we could all be a part of something bigger than ourselves (including our fears, disappointments, etc), that we are God’s craftsmanship and he has good works that he has prepared in advance for us to do.  That God is on the move, as He always has been, but that maybe He is inviting us to be a part of what He’s doing in a way that will bring us alive, or bring us to His life. I spent much of this day leading up to the concert preoccupied with worries over the economy and the gleeful onslaught of doom and gloom from the media.  Tonight I felt like I could breathe again as I was reminded that God is watching over us, His Kingdom is moving forward, and that we are in His hands, and not only that but we are also called to be his hands, and that in this understanding, and in this trust, and in this obedience, there is peace. A music gathering where we are called to trust, to give, and to cast our gaze outward to those whose troubles belittle ours at a time when all that is so counter intuitive may be just what the doctor ordered for our troubled times. Thank you Sara and Troy for taking risks and adding to the beauty.  “Your dreams inspire…”

Author’s Note: I’ve always been a fan of H.P. Lovecraft.  I love his weird words and the strange way he’s able to evoke things that are both awe-inspiring and horrific at the same time.  His stories, even the bad ones and those that are merely repeats of others, stick in my mind for days after I read them partly because he never lets the reader see everything, he leaves you with glimpses, impressions, reactions.  You have to let your mind fill in the blanks and what your own mind comes up with is often more disturbing than anything he could have written. When I tried my hand at writing a ‘ghost story’ about my own neighborhood and its location on Stephens Hill I succumbed to my desire to write in the style of Lovecraft.  Anyone who’s a fan will recognize the structure, word choices, and even a certain (slightly altered) name.  As much as I like the way the story turned out, it’s so clearly Lovecraftian that I can’t really claim it as my own and prefer to think of it as an homage to a master of the genre. THE STEPHENS HILL HORROR Aida died in the summer of ’37.  Tuberculosis.  It consumed her and left behind a dried husk barely resembling the woman I’d known and loved and married.  When she was gone, the house wouldn’t empty of her.  Memories peopled the hallways, closets, and empty corners like unwelcome guests that wouldn’t leave.  They spoke to me when all I wanted was silence and mocked me when I begged for their company.  It was maddening.  Two weeks after I buried her, I left the house.  I sold everything in it, everything of hers, of mine, everything we had together.  I wanted none of it.  I took the money and the clothes I wore and walked away.  I wandered the dirty roads of the countryside without aim or direction, not knowing what I was looking for or where I went. Summer stretched deep into autumn.  The air was sizzle-crisp, dry as burnt paper, the ground barren and cruel like the ruin of an unhealed burn. I lay by the roadways, or stole into old barns to pass the nights until I came at last to the house on Stephens Hill.  The first time I saw it, the door was hanging by one hinge and the dry wind howled through its opening as if the house itself was gasping and suffocating in the heat.  The place was abandoned and dead and the unnatural summer refused to let winter come and bury it.  It was perfect. I bought the house from a man named Alan Jerrick.  Jerrick was a genuine old-timer, a man whose memory held the Civil War and the grudges it left behind.  He favored a leg and carried a hickory cane that he’d whittled down its length.  Years of use and handling had left it smooth and grime-worn and a carving that could have been either a vine or a serpent coiled its way down from the handle to the ground and gave the impression that the old man was rooted to the very earth where he stood.  His back bent vulture-like with age and he used the cane to force his crooked bones upright, a battle he seemed on the verge of either winning or losing dependant upon the persuasion of his mood.  We spoke little, conducting our transaction in nods and handshakes and the scratching of pens. “Who lived in it?” I asked him when our business was settled. “Jerricks,” he answered. “And you say you call it the Warren?” He looked past my shoulder, up the hill behind the house then grunted and strained against his cane to stand a little taller. “What’s a warren anyway?  Rabbit hole, right?  Saw a few of them in the yard when I came up the hill.” He shifted his eyes onto me.  “Tunnels,” he said. “Well, that’s what I meant.  Rabbit tunnels.” He shifted his eyes back to the hill and grunted again. “When was the last time folks lived here?” “Nobody lives here.” I raised my voice and asked him again, thinking he’d heard me wrong.  I tried to aim my question at what I thought might be his good ear.  If he heard my question, though, he ignored it.  He reached out a bony, liver-spotted hand and tucked the key into my shirt pocket then swung his body around on the cane and walked down the hill.  I watched after him until he reached the gate at the road, mounted his wagon, and drove out of sight behind the trees. “Somebody lives here now,” I said to the house.  The door yawned at me. In the first few months, I was, if not happy, at least numb to the past.  The house had been empty for years, probably decades, so I had things to keep me busy, things that kept my mind out of memories and the horrors of Aida’s descent.  There were legions of spiders cloistered in every nook.  The birds of early spring had long since flown and left their nests crumbling on cabinet shelves and tottering from the chandeliers.  Inspection of any sort of overhang regularly offered the discovery of enormous wasp’s nests.  Rodents had scattered their refuse across the floors and chewed at baseboards, and steps, and windowpanes.  I spent my time attacking the disorder with a broom, first clearing a single room to make it habitable then slowly widening my territory, reclaiming the house from the ravages of nature.  One by one I uncovered and restored rooms to their former use and beauty.  The house can only have been magnificent in its prime.  Thus far, I had no indications of the terrible things to come and gave no thought to why such a house was abandoned.  I saw it only as my own good fortune and my chance to escape Aida’s long shadow. I believe I can trace my suspicions of Stephens Hill to the day I began to reclaim the kitchen.  The summer had loosened its hold and nights were becoming chill.  For that reason I determined that the kitchen, and the woodstove in particular, would be my priority as I would require its heat to survive the winter.  I batted the spider webs down and chased out their residents.  I emptied each cupboard and cabinet of its insectine spoor and all the various nests and nibblings of the sundry creatures that had inhabited them over the years.  From within the aged cabinetry I salvaged an ample number of fine dishes, glassware, cookpots, and even a complete set of fine silver.  In my naïve joy at finding a treasure of such worth, my mind didn’t entertain the slightest wonder that the house had remained unplundered during its years of vacancy. I polished the silver and put the kitchen in order then turned to the stove.  Years of weather and rust had seized the hinges and only after some effort with a crowbar and an oilcan did I manage to crack the iron hollow within it.  A gray puff of ash erupted out of the void and set me coughing.  Wind whistled across the chimney vent and a moan sloughed down the throat of the stovepipe and out of the ashen hollow.  When I had my breath, I pulled the door open.  Inside huddled a mound of gray-white ash with charred pieces of log jutting up out of it like teeth.  I jabbed the shovel in and scooped out a pile of ash, dumped it in the pail.  Leaf-sized bits of paper, lumps of charred wood and powdery ash hit the bottom of the pail with a soft whoosh and a clatter.  I pulled out shovel full after shovel full until the hollow was clean enough to be serviceable then hauled the pail out and dumped it.  Half buried in the ash pile lay a charred newspaper.  The partial headline stared up at me: “Jerrick Boy Missing”. The corners of the paper crumbled when I picked it up.  Three edges were charred and only the top lines of the story remained. “The six-year-old son of local farmer Alan Jerrick has been missing since last week.  Mr. Jerrick first reported his worries to the Davidson County Sheriff two days ago.  The boy, Stephen Jerrick, was reportedly exploring the hill and woods near the farmstead and did not return home at dinnertime.  The boy’s father performed an exhaustive search over the days following his dis-“ I sifted through the rest of the ash but found no more of the newspaper.  It stuck in my head immediately that Stephens Hill might be named for the tragedy of the missing child.  Or had the child, perhaps, been named for the hill?  Surely the name of the boy and the name of the hill were no coincidence.  I intended to speak with Mr. Jerrick about the matter if I saw him again. I took an armful of wood from the woodpile and placed it in the stove.  Soon I had an admirable fire lit and shut the door of the stove with satisfaction.  Then, as I was in the process of claiming my victory over the state of the room, I heard a soft sort of a thump.  It was so slight at first that I thought perhaps I was imagining it but slowly it grew and grew until I began to look around for the source.  The wind, I thought, a shutter loosened and batting itself on the pane.  But no, it was growing louder and coming from within the house rather than without.  I tilted my head and followed my ear.  It was not a loud sound, you must understand, and yet it was a sound I was sure I hadn’t heard before, a small thumping, like a knock on a door but lighter, softer, and somehow clever and altogether unlike the mere blowing of the wind or the creaking of the house.  It had an urgency, an insistence to it that was uneven, almost panicked. I followed the thumping to the rear of the kitchen, to the pantry.  The sound came from somewhere behind the door, somewhere yet distant but certainly in that direction.  I drew open the door and, in a most timid fashion, the beating stopped, as a child stops itself when caught in mischief. Only a dim light shone into the small room from the kitchen window, just enough to see by.  Shelves regimented each wall and dozens of jars sat upon them squat and milky old.  An age-eaten bag of what must have been flour lay slumped corpse-like against the wall and an assortment of crates, boxes, and empty jars littered the rest of the room.  There was no other door but I felt certain that the soft thumping had come from behind the left wall, near the floor. I stepped inside, more curious than anything, thinking some rodent, perhaps one of the many rabbits I’d seen in the yard, had become trapped amongst the crates.  I tried to drag a large wood-slatted crate away from the wall but it came apart in my hands and a cavalcade of dried herbs and kitchenware spilled across the floor.  I hooked my foot around the back corner of the ruined crate and heaved it away from the wall.  At first, I saw nothing but the pine board of the interior but as my eyes adjusted to the dim light of the shadows I saw that the pine boards had rotted away at knee-level revealing a slab of masonry.  Around the entire rim of the opening in the wall a black greasy mold extended across the boards in festooning tendrils.  I stared at this revelation in confusion for some time.  The house was of wood frame construction, not masonry.  I had not seen in any part of the house nor its foundation any sign of brick and mortar nor stonework.  Yet here in the pantry there seemed to be some exception.  I stooped down to look closer and quite by accident placed my hand on the edge of the rotting pine wall.  The black mold that had rotted it away clung to my hand and stunk.  I wiped it on my pant leg in disgust.  The exposed rock behind the wall was not man-made brick and mortar; it was old stone, smooth, and cool, and ancient.  In the center of the stone section was an opening that seemed to me like a door.  The solid stone around it was smooth and of a single piece, but an area about two feet by two feet in its center was filled with smaller pieces of rock.  It looked as though the door had been sealed with stones and indeed, upon further inspection, I found that near the top of the opening the stones had worked loose and behind them was a panel of wood that was plastered around the edges to seal the entire orifice.  I felt certain that the thumping had come from behind the seal.  I could investigate no further at the time, though.  The light was waning and the rancid stench of the molded wood around the opening was overwhelming.  A mystery for another day, I told myself.  I shudder to think of it. As I have mentioned, rabbits were a regular sight in the yard and the surrounding wood since the day I bought the house.  I thought nothing of them at first, who would?  Rabbits on a farm and in its fields are certainly no strange thing, especially when no farmhouse dog has been vigilant at chasing them off.  But in the months after I moved to The Warren they began to unsettle me.  It is difficult to determine the precise point at which the thought took form in my mind that they were, perhaps, unnatural.  Initially, they delighted me.  They were my companions at labor.  In the early morning when I opened the front porch door, their pensive faces would greet me before they turned and bounded out of sight into the wood like grasshoppers before a child playing in tall grass.  When I tilled the garden under, a small group came out and played in the field as they watched me.  I came to enjoy them and even entertained the thought that I might keep one or two of them as pets.  One in particular I noted.  He was a great beast of a rabbit, hulking compared to the others, with thick black legs.  His back was a mottling of grays but the rest of him was black, his head like an abyss with bright pink eyes staring out.  The curious thing about him was that I never saw him jump.  Wherever he went, he walked, ambling along in an awkward gait forced upon him by size, and age, and the bulk of his massive rear legs.  I never got the impression that he couldn’t jump if he chose to, he simply seemed to have the attitude that he had no need of it, that he’d outgrown it, looked down upon it.  I named him Old Pink-Eye and at first, I was always happy to discover he’d come out to watch my work.  But as the days went on and my familiarity with the rabbits grew, I began to notice of them strange behaviors. One day I spent the better part of the morning on my hands and knees trying to eliminate the weeds from the flower garden around the front porch.  This wasn’t the sort of work I was used to or even particularly cared for but I could not look at the overgrown stand of hydrangea’s, jasmine, and lilies without each time thinking that Aida would never allow such a state in her garden.  Her ghost had pursued me even here and I hoped to exorcise it by putting the garden in order the way she would have done.  Maybe then she would leave me be. By mid-morning, my fingers were raw and the wedge of headway I had made in the garden was depressingly small.  I began to imagine that Aida was standing behind me, watching me, pointing out to me the stray weed I had missed, or the rock I had failed to toss out, or the perennial I had pulled up by mistake.  No matter how I tried to put her from my mind she remained there, ordering me, pressing me on.  At last I could stand it no more and spun around to confirm to myself that she was only in my head.  As I knew it would be, the yard was empty.  There was no Aida, no one, nothing.  And yet, there was something.  Just at the edge of the yard, in the shadow of the wood, a rabbit, a small white one with a brown swatch across its flanks, sat upright like a dog considering me with milky eyes. I turned back to my work, relieved that Aida had left me alone and yet I could not shake the thought that the rabbit was still watching.  When I turned again to look at it, it was gone.  Then I spotted another one across the yard, near the fence, a bloated grey one, upright, still, watching.  I stared at him with nervous curiosity until, so quickly that I wondered if it had been there to begin with, he darted away.  After that, it seemed that no matter where I went or what I did, the rabbits watched.  It was not the sort of watching that an animal does when its world is suddenly intruded upon by some human endeavor and it stares in silence a moment before retreating to a place it can do its animal business in secret.  No, it was nothing like that.  I had the distinct sense that they watched me because they were told to, or maybe they were made to.  They regarded me as if they noted every movement and calculated its import and consequence to weigh upon some clandestine scale. In time, the feelings of delight and companionship that I’d felt at the sight of the rabbits around the house faded.  I dreaded the thought that one might see me.  I cannot explain why, I only know that their seeing of me was unnatural somehow, perverse.  I began to sneak about at times, cautious that I remain unseen. One day I found in one of the closets a hank of twine that had escaped rot and decay.  I cut it into a dozen four-foot lengths and tied each into a loose slipknot as my father had taught me as a boy.  He had been adept at setting snares for rabbit and opossum and other small game.  I never had need of the skill as a bank man in the city, but here in my age I found that his old lessons came back to me.  I slipped out the door with the snares tucked into my belt.  From the porch, I scanned the yard for watching eyes but saw none.  I stooped over and stepped softly toward the wood.  I chose my steps with purpose, taking care not to snap a twig or disturb a molehill.  I paused at the edge of the yard.  This was the first time I meant to enter the wood of Stephens Hill and I am not honest if I say did so without trepidation.  I peered into the darkened thatch of cedars and maple and huge twisted oak looking for I knew not what.  Briars and vines coiled and twisted across the ground like the desiccated remains of headless serpents.  In the angled light I caught the shimmering glint of a spider’s web that stretched an impossible span between trees, its spinner seated at the center like the outstretched hand of a corpse.  I ducked under the web and crept into the thick of the wood.  As the brush became thicker, I saw what I was looking for, a rabbit trail, a small, worn path about eight inches wide coursing through the briars.  Where the brush was thickest, it became like a tunnel passing through the growth.  I followed it as quietly as I could, gently easing brambles out of the way with my hand to set each step upon the ground with as much silence as I could manage.  Several times I stopped and stood statue-like for minutes at a time, scanning the forest floor for pairs of milk-pink eyes but saw none. The trail ended at a hole in the ground some ten inches across.  Bits of hair were caught in the brambles at its edge and a few small twigs, or possibly bones, cluttered its rim.  A thick animal stink issued out of it.  I approached the hole and the wood became silent, crickets ceased to chirp, cicadas ended their songs, birds whispered if they spoke at all.  I scanned the woods around me for eyes or movement.  I found neither and stooped down.  I set one knee on the ground and looked into the depth of the hole.  I could see little, only a great black throat twisting away into the earth.  For a brief moment, I thought that perhaps, deep down, I saw something shift.  But the more I looked, the more sure I was that it was nothing but a trick of the eye.  I began to feel watched and urgency compelled me.  I took one of the twine snares from my belt, set it around the opening of the hole, and tied the end to the trunk of a briar. I found five holes in all and set my snares on each.  During the entire expedition into the wood, I did not sight even a single rabbit.  Their absence unnerved me.  When I stepped at last back into the yard, I breathed easier in relief and hoped for a meal of rabbit the next day. That evening as I sat on the porch, using the last of the light to read some of my Hugo before retiring, I looked up to discover that perhaps a dozen of the rabbits had congregated at the edge of the wood to watch me.  Eerily silent they sat there, upright, pursed lips, ears erect without so much as a twitch, dozens of milky pink eyes trained directly at me.  This was disquieting, I hope you will understand, and yet it was not the worst.  I stared back at them for some minutes, unsure of what was happening, and then slowly, one by one, they turned and crawled into the encroaching darkness of the wood.  When I had watched the last one retreat I kept my gaze upon the wood in shock or amazement or horror, I know not which. And then I saw him.  Out of the shadows two rolling pink eyes emerged.  Old Pink-Eye ambled into the twilight and squatted horribly in the rotted leaves of the forests edge.  Our eyes considered each other and in that moment I knew that it was more than just a rabbit I saw.  It was something monstrous and eldritch.  From behind those cloudy, blood-milk eyes, a presence impossibly old, and patient, and wretched had set its contemplation upon me.  Something that watches and does not hurry because it knows its traps are laid and its prey is unaware.  Something that knows the taste of centuries and millennia and sleeps or wakes with the turning of long dead stars in the unfathomed and most blighted reaches of creation.  I scarcely mastered myself against the scream that erupted inside me. Then came the thumping.  Soft, barely perceptible.  I turned my ear in the direction of the sound, coming from the pantry I knew, and when I turned back, Old Pink-Eye was gone.  I ran into the kitchen and pulled open the pantry door.  My heart beat so loudly that I wasn’t sure whether it was my heart I heard or the soft beating from within the pantry stonework.  The stones that filled the opening in the wall were vibrating, only slightly, but in rhythm with the pounding from within.  I stood paralyzed by the sight, unsure if my mind was playing tricks on me until one of the stones at the top fell to the floor and a small avalanche of others followed it.  My only recollection of my thought process then was that I must at all costs reseal the breach.  My heart beat wildly in my chest as I knelt and jammed the fallen stones back into place in the wall.  I was desperate to repair it, desperate that what ever was behind the stones and the wooden seal should not escape.  With each stone I replaced, two more fell.  I was mad to put them all back.  As I labored the beating continued, louder now, distinct, undeniable, I could see the wood shudder with each pulse.  My fingers scrabbled across the floor searching for stones to fill the breach.  When the stones were gone, I used the jars and cans strewn around the room.  When those where gone I pressed against the barrier with my hands, willing it to hold.  Praying it would hold.  Praying I would never know what was behind it.  I don’t know when it stopped, I only remember that after an eternity of madness, all that remained was the beating of my own heart and I held my breath and listened.  Silence. It was days before I was able to put whatever had happened in the pantry out of my mind.  I scavenged a number of sturdy boards from the porch, prying them up and ripping them away leaving the porch floor like a lunatic’s tooth-barren smile.  I nailed the boards across the pantry door.  I spent an entire day tearing them up and nailing them down, determined to make sure the door was sealed, that no one and nothing could get out from within.  At night, each sigh of the wind against the house, every bump or creak of its age-old wooden bones startled me out of fear that they were the knocker come again to that terrible and unnatural door inside the pantry.  I could not sleep until it the seal was complete.  But all my fears were unfounded.  No knock came.  In a few days time I convinced myself that I had imagined it all.  There had never been a knocking, nor a beating, it was the shutter, the screen door, a bird at the window.  I slept easy then.  But I did not remove the boards from the pantry door. When I had put the pantry incident out of my mind, I went back to the woods to see if my snares had caught their prey.  I took along a potato sack to carry my catch and set out across the yard.  Several rabbits stopped in their play when I left the porch and watched me.  I nodded my head to them in acknowledgment.  I knew they were there and did not care.  They squatted, unmoving, and stared at me as I walked across the yard and ducked into the wood. I felt no need to keep my steps quiet this time, I thrashed my way through the thickets and briars without any heed of the noise I made.  When I found the first rabbit hole I stopped and stooped over to stare at it.  The snare was gone.  I cursed under my breath and stirred the brush on the ground with my fingers in search of it.  At the base of the briar next to the hole a small loop of twine was still tied around the trunk where I had anchored the snare.  One of the detestable rabbits had gnawed through the twine about three inches from the knot. At the next three rabbit holes I found similar disappointment.  Something had even torn the entire briar from the ground where it anchored the snare at one of them.  The last hole, however, was different.  The snare had been tripped and pulled tight but there was nothing caught in it.  It was what lay beside it that captivated me.  A shoe.  No bigger than my hand.  It certainly had not been there when I set the snare and its presence distressed me though I couldn’t explain why at the time.  I picked it up.  It was made of thin leather and stitched together with cord that was fraying at every joint.  The sole had worn through at the ball.  It was a child’s shoe, there was no question.  One of those execrable rabbits must have dragged it out of a nearby yard to use as a new furnishing for its hole.  I spat and flung the shoe into the hole.  When shoe disappeared into the black heart of the burrow, I heard a soft scuffling.  One of the spying little rodents was in there watching me!  I flung myself to the ground and reached into the hole.  My arm went in up to the elbow without effort but then the first crook of the small tunnel forced me to roll around onto my side to bend my arm and reach deeper.  My fingers brushed something and it moved away.  I nearly had it.  I rolled on the ground until I was able to push my arm into the hole right up to the shoulder.  A rotten stench issued up out of the ground and surrounded me.  I searched from side to side with my hand hoping to seize a fistful of fur, rip it from its filthy little cave, and snap its neck.  Once more, I felt something with the tip of my fingers and it moved away. “Come here, you,” I growled into the dust. I slapped my hand around in the dark, snatching first one way, then the other, hoping to surprise it but caught nothing for my trouble.  At last the stench and the dust overwhelmed me and I went into a fit of coughing.  I hacked and spit and wheezed until I was exhausted and lay panting in the dirt, my arm still thrust deep into the rabbit hole. Then I felt cool, wet bursts of air on my fingertips, like something breathing.  No, not breathing, sniffing.  It was sniffing my fingers.  Then I felt something like a small wet nose lightly touch the knuckle of my index finger.  Patiently, I waited.  The sniffing, the nuzzling, made its way down the length of my finger to my palm.  A little farther, I thought, a little farther and I’ll have your neck in my hand.  Then the fat, wet touch of a tongue drew itself across my fingers.  It tasted me.  Again, the tongue, fat, buttery, and trembling wetted its way across my hand.  I grimaced in disgust and then the horrible truth struck me.  A rabbit’s tongue is like a cat’s: small, dry, and scratchy.  The fat wet thing slopped across my hand again, tasting my flesh.  I screamed and jerked my arm out of the hole.  Whatever was in that hole was no rabbit.  Something down there in the earth, something awful had been tasting me.  Tasting me!  I looked at my hand.  It was wettened with a thick, stringy mucus the color of pear flesh.  I screamed again and wiped my hand on my shirt, on my pants, scoured it with dirt.  Then as I jumped to my feet, my mind froze in horror.  In the dirt near the hole, coming down from Stephens Hill was a small pair of footprints.  Though I could not test my suspicion because I had thrown the shoe into the hole, it was terrifyingly clear to me that the shoe matched the prints.  I spun around and around, my eyes leaping across the ground looking everywhere for the continuation of the tracks but there were none.  The tracks led directly to the hole and disappeared!  God in heaven!  I backed away, still wiping at my hand, horrified.  I turned and ran and didn’t stop until I was back inside the house with the door locked. The next day I went to town to buy supplies.  The over-long summer had given way to an incredibly brief autumn and now winter was descending like an executioner’s axe.  My failure to ensnare the rabbits had made it very clear to me that food was becoming scarce and winter would make it scarcer.  I had little money left after the purchase of the house but it would be enough.  Corn, flour, canned fruits and vegetables, salted meat—all the things Aida had always seen to so that I could keep my mind to my work.  How lost and ill prepared I was without her. The town’s general store was less than a mile walk and I greeted the exercise with welcome.  Though the rabbits had come out to follow me with their eyes as I made my way down the hill, they left me once I reached the road and for the first time in some weeks I felt at ease and out from under the weight of their rodential stare. The proprietor of the store, Tom Scobern, was a gentle, likeable man that prided himself on being the friend of anyone that set foot in his presence.  He knew the business of everyone in town and knew what needing keeping secret and what needed passing on. “How you making out with the old Jerrick place?” he asked me when I came to discuss my payment and delivery.  His tone was just as friendly as Sunday dinner but I’m no reader of a face if I didn’t detect the wrinkles of some concern upon his. “Making do,” I told him.  “Lots of rabbits.  Never seen the like.” “That’s what old Al Jerrick used to say.  After he lost his son he went a bit mad you know?” I didn’t know and I told him. “Old man Jerrick spent weeks up on the hill, looking for his boy.  When he come down he wasn’t the same.  Or so I hear.  That was long before my time.  For years though he used to come in here, buying his whiskey, drunk as the moon and carrying on about the tunnels and the beasts inside them that carried off his boy.”  He chuckled and tightened his apron strings nervously. “You believe him?” I asked, only half wanting to hear the answer. He laughed and swatted his hand at the air in dismissal.  “Lord, no.  He used to rant and rave about stuff that would make your skin crawl.  What was it he used to say,” he screwed up his eyes as he searched his memory and took one hand out of his apron pocket to place it against his lips.  “Used to stand out in the street and holler things like, ‘beware He Who Dwells Beneath the Hill’.  That’s one of them.  He used to have a whole passel of crazy talk he’d shout at people.  ‘Yog Soggoth, the Burrower in the Dark!  Baron of the Maddening Black!  He stirs, He stirs under the hill!’”  He bent backward in laughter at the memory then pulled a cloth from his apron pocket and wiped his forehead as he caught his breath.  “Old man Jerrick and the real world parted ways when his son died, I’m afraid.  No laughing matter.  I should show some respect.” He cleared his throat and bent over the counter to total up my purchases.  I stared at the top of his balding head as he scribbled on his ledger books and receipts.  The old man’s words fluttered like startled bats trapped inside my skull, bouncing around, rattling off the cavernous bones in my head, desperate in their search to get out and fly away.  Yog Soggoth.  He Who Dwells Beneath the Hill.  I raised a hand to my head to steady myself, to quiet the thoughts that had broken loose. “What exactly happened to the Jerrick boy?” I asked.  I little more than whispered my question.  Even as I spoke it I wanted to call it back.  I spoke only in an effort to cover up the jibbering of the old man’s madness in my mind. “The official story was that the boy run away from home,” he said with an unconvinced shrug. “But the boy was only six.” “Yep.  Who ever heard of a six-year-old running away?” he shot up his eyebrows, put his hands out to the sides and turned palms up.  “Folks say he run off up the hill chasing those rabbits.” “They never found a body did they?” “Nope.  That’s what drove the old man mad, they say.  He claimed for years that his boy was up there, alive, waiting to be found.  But no one ever did find him.  He was mad by then, started claiming the rabbits dragged the boy off.  Rabbits!  Can you imagine such a thing?”  I could.  I could imagine that very thing but I dared not say so.  “Anything else I can get for you, sir?” “No.  Thank you, Tom.”  My mind was spinning with possibilities, the madness of it.  The image of the footprints and the shoe plagued my mind with whispers of Yog Soggoth echoing in the background. “We’ll get it all loaded up and delivered by the end of the week.  Don’t get yourself dragged off by no rabbits in the meantime now!”  Tom slapped the counter as he laughed.  I didn’t return the humor and he stared after me, trying to compose himself as I retreated from the store with my hands in my hair. The next day I inspected the boards sealing the pantry and satisfied myself that they were secure.  Dreams had kept me from sleep and in the night I had become obsessive about cleaning the hand that met with—I dare not think what—in the depth of the rabbit hole.  No matter how I washed it and scrubbed at it and scoured it a terrible odor clung to my palm, something like the odious stink of things freshly dead and awaiting the gullet of a buzzard.  I worked at it in a fever until the skin was raw and reddened and in places oozed bright red capillary blood.  And still I smelled its stink. The woodpile had been whittled down to the earth-rotted timbers on the ground and the wind blowing in from the east convinced me that if I did not restock the firewood, I would freeze in my sleep inside the week.  So again I took to the wood.  I dared not venture back into the area I had snared.  The thought of the thing in the hole and the stink of it on my skin-raw palm warded me well away.  It was up the hill I went.  The trees at the crest were years dead.  All I would need to do was pick what I required from the ground and haul it back to the house. I had to do it all under the watch of the loathsome rabbits.  By dozens they were out.  The edge of the wood was thick with their pasty eyes, following my every move like a bad portrait that you couldn’t escape.  When I came to the edge of the yard I bent down and plucked a handful of stones from the gravel.  I took aim at the nearest watcher and hurled a stone.  I missed by inches but the rabbit didn’t so much as twitch.  I hurled two more stones at other rabbits within my reach, missing each time.  Then the few nearest me, including the ones I had thrown stones at, turned and crawled back into the underbrush.  I threw what remained of the stones in my hand after them in an attempt to claim some irrational victory.  Then I climbed up the hill. Dry wood was ample and I began to collect it into small stacks and piles according to size.  I favored my raw hand but I could do little work without it.  The limbs I picked up bit into it and tore the already soft flesh leaving splinters and several small gashes that oozed blood and caused me to wince with each exertion.  I began to pay such attention and care to my bleeding hand that I became careless.  I cradled it and inspected it as I moved from place to place and did not mind my feet.  Though I had not taken notice at first, there were holes everywhere hidden by the dry brush covering the ground.  It was only a matter of time before I stepped into one.  Luckily, the ankle was not broken.  But now, in addition to the cradled and bleeding hand, I had an ankle to favor while I worked.  I cursed the rabbits and their holes with each step I took after my fall.  Poison, I told myself.  The snares didn’t work so I would have to try poison. A massive oak crowned the top of the hill.  Its swollen limbs twisted out of the fat, rippled trunk like black fingers curled in death.  The floor beneath it was littered with fallen wood.  As I had done elsewhere, I gathered it into piles.  Each gnarled piece I picked up opened the wound in the hand but I was determined that the work should be finished.  When I had harvested the wood on the side of the tree nearest the house, I circled around to the far side to collect the rest.  For the briefest moment, I thought I heard the light sprinkle of laughter in the wind, high and careless like a child’s.  I looked around but the sound was gone.  I bent back to my work, first gathering the wood farthest out from the trunk, slowly working my way inward.  When I was within only a few feet of the trunk, I heard it again.  Laughter.  This time I was sure I had not imagined it.  I looked around the hillside.  I was alone.  Not even the rabbits were watching.  I bent to pick up another dead piece of wood and my eyes stopped on the trunk of the tree.  It was open.  On this side of the tree the great arboreal husk had been rotted from the inside out and was hollow.  Yet, it was more than just hollow.  I crept closer to it, limping on my twisted ankle, peering into the blackness at its heart.  The hollow of the tree was perhaps five or six feet in diameter.  The wood that remained was black and rotted and filled with wormholes and the gnawed history of generations of insects that hatched, and ate, and spawned, and died within its bosom.  The soft tingle of laughter whispered in my ear again and it came from the heart of the sylvan titan that loomed ominous above me.  I am a madman not to have run at that very moment.  What is this morbid curiosity of man that drives him to see things that should not been seen, to know things never meant to be contained within the human intellect?  Whatever mad engine of the mind compelled me, I stepped closer.  I looked into the heart of rot and time and saw the tunnel that bore deep into the earth beneath it.  The maw of the tree gave way to a cavern of stone covered in lichen and moss.  A fetid odor seeped out of the walls and pressed against me.  Madness.  Madness to go on.  And yet I stepped into the very clutch of it.  The coolness of the stone raised gooseflesh on my skin and I clamped my good hand to my nose to filter out the oppressive stink.  Laughter again, from deeper inside. I limped down the slope, my eyes wide against the dark.  I feared even to blink until my eyes began to water.  The stone walls of the catacomb were carven with images of things too terrible to describe, things that can only have been imagined in the most unspeakable madness.  I cannot even allow my mind to think of the scenes I saw depicted without tottering further toward madness myself.  Letters of a language long dead to the tongues of men sprawled across the stone.  I thanked God that I could not read their meanings, or know what horrors they conveyed, or decipher their secrets.  There are abominations written there that must never been spoken or known.  I took another step, I know not why, any sane man would have fled.  The laughter came to me again but different this time.  It was a knowing laughter, a laughter that has purpose and wickedness behind it.  My ankle buckled and I caught myself on the wall with my bloodied hand.  The surface of the stone was cool and wet and inexplicably flesh-like.  I wretched at the touch of it.  When I withdrew my hand a bloody palm print remained on the wall.  The laughter again, and now it sounded deeper, fuller and, God help me, closer.  I began to retreat up the slope.  Once more, my ankle twisted and I slipped.  I reached out to stop my fall and again left a red palm of blood upon the blasphemous wall.  As I regained my footing, the blood on the wall began to disappear.  I stared at it in confusion until I realized that it wasn’t disappearing, it was being absorbed as if the very pores of the stone were drinking it, feasting on it.  Then, from the deeps of the earth below me, down in the dreadful bowls of the cavern, something began to shift.  A gale of foul wind issued up from the depths of the hill followed by a moan like the complaint of great bridge irons or thunder on the far side of a mountain range.  I began to scream.  The floor of the cavern trembled and heaved beneath me as I scrabbled up the slope.  Each time my hand touched the floor or wall it left its bloody mark and each time the stone lapped it up.  The harrowing sound of high-pitched laughter followed me up the slope until at last I burst from the hollow of the cyclopean oak. When I emerged, the ground ceased to move beneath me and the laughter hushed. One thing more I must tell you of the ghastly hollow of that tree.  You may think me mad, indeed you must, for madness can be the only possible explanation.  When I emerged once more into the light of day, I turned to look behind me before fleeing down the hill to the house.  What I saw, I will never be able to erase from my mind.  The image is so terrifying to recall that I can scarcely speak to you of it now.  I saw, I think I saw, rising out of that blasphemous cavern into the worm-rotten heart of the oak a form—no—I dare not even think of it as a form, merely the silhouette, rising from the deep, the small, blackened shape of a young boy.  It is madness, is it not?  To think that after all these years, that Stephen Jerrick is up there, alive, or dead, or something trapped in between?  I tell you only what I saw with my own eyes.  I pray to God that I am mad. Just before nightfall, the rabbits came.  Old Pink-Eye led them, squat, bloated, eyes-rolling as he engaged his ruined gait.  I peered out the corner of the window and watched them.  They came out of the wood in throngs, making their way across the yard in silence, not hopping but walking, crawling, bellies to the earth like abominations.  They have surrounded the house and they sit there now, upright, ears attentive, watching with their milky, pink eyes.  They have never come in these numbers, nor ever this close to the house.  Old Pink-Eye himself is hunched on the front doorstep and there he waits in abhorrent patience, and watches. When I had barricaded myself against them in the house, I became sure that I had only imagined the shaking of the earth while I was within the throat of the old oak.  I must admit, though, that I no longer trust my own mind.  I fear it has been splintered by my poor Aida’s death and the unnatural the things I’ve seen and heard on Stephens Hill.  Therefore, I have balanced all the china and glassware of the house at the edges of the tables and shelves so that, should the earth again shudder and writhe as it did beneath the hill, I will know that I am yet sane. When I placed the dishes to warn me, I inspected the pantry door.  The reeking, black mold that infested the interior wall has spread.  All the boards that I nailed to the lintel to seal it are covered by its inky tendrils and its odor fills the house.  The boards are soft to the touch and perhaps an hour ago, the beating began again. Should anyone find these pages, I beg you to leave this house.  Flee Stephens Hill.  Shun this place and never return.  Something has broken through the pantry wall.  It beats upon the outer door!  Laughter, laughter from within!  The glasses are shattering!  The earth creeps!  The Dweller in the Hill is stirring!

Reading with my children has reminded me of a truth that years of adulthood had almost caused me to forget: that “story” is truer than “precept.” We adults tend to think that we arrive at the truth of a story by reducing it to two or three abstractions that the narrative embodies. The parable of the Prodigal Son is “about” grace and forgiveness. The Lord of the Rings is “about” courage and friendship. We listen with half an ear as the preacher reads the scripture lesson, because his sermon is going to boil it down to three basic truths anyway. But our children know it’s the story that does the work on us, not the disembodied precept. If you don’t believe it, open up a book of Aesop’s Fables; skip the fables, and just read the morals at the end of the fables. You might just as well tell punch lines instead of telling jokes. The moral may summarize the story and bring it to a point, but the moral isn’t the point. It’s not that abstract concepts or ideas are unimportant. Mercy, forgiveness, repentance, abundance—all the things that form the basis of Christian truth—are abstract concepts. But being mere mortals, we can’t really understand any of those things if they aren’t grounded in what we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. You can talk about grace until you’re blue in the face, but you aren’t going to come up with a definition that improves on the parable of the Prodigal Son: a father, arms outstretched, welcoming a rebellious and wicked son back into his home. And the word “friendship” doesn’t mean much unless you’ve seen a friend in action—Sam Gamgee, for instance, nearly drowning himself rather than let Frodo journey to Mordor alone. The Habit of Understanding The moral benefit of a story goes far beyond the “moral of the story.” Almost by definition, an avid reader is in the habit of understanding what it’s like to be somebody else. Whatever the moral of the story, reading sharpens the skills of empathy, which is not only a moral virtue, but a huge advantage in any pursuit. Habit Five of Steven Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” boils it down: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Readers, you might say, are habitual understanders. A story allows a reader to join in the inner lives of its characters. Readers aren’t mere spectators or audience members. A well-written book allows them to experience what it’s like to be another person. And isn’t that the very basis of empathy and kindness? Isn’t it a key component of love? Our natural tendency is to close in on ourselves, to be so concerned with our own interests, our own preoccupations that we find it hard to understand another person’s perspective. More than that, we find it very hard to understand our own selves. Consider the case of David and Bathsheba. Because I tell stories for a living, one of my heroes is the prophet Nathan. He’s the one who had the unfortunate job of confronting David about his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband Uriah. One has to be careful when exposing a king who has already demonstrated a willingness to murder in order to keep his guilt hidden. So Nathan made up a story. He told about a rich man with many flocks and herds and a poor man who had only one little lamb that he loved like a family member. When the rich man needed a lamb to feed a visitor, he took the poor man’s pet lamb rather than slaughter one of his own. David was enraged. He vowed that the rich man would die for this injustice. That’s when Nathan brought the truth down like a thunderstroke: “You are the man.” It was one of the great moments in the history of fiction. Cut to the heart, David repented of his sin. And Nathan the prophet lived to tell more stories. Nathan’s story did what all great fiction does: it took David out of himself, and it gave him an emotional attachment to what it is good and right. Nathan didn’t tell the king anything he didn’t know already. David knew it was wrong to kill a man and take his wife. But he had built for himself a little world of self-justification and self-protection and self-indulgence that made it possible for him to ignore the moral facts of the matter. Nathan’s story took him out of that world and let him see what it looked like from the outside. Loving the Right As the prophet Nathan knew, it’s not enough to know what’s right. People have to desire what’s right before they’ll do it consistently. Stories have a unique ability to shape a person’s sympathies—to change what they desire. I love the Narnia books. I think what I love most about them is the fact that they give us a chance to renew the way we feel about things we’ve known all our lives. If you’ve been paying attention in Sunday School, you already know all the theology in the Narnia books. They don’t give you new facts to chew on. They help align your feelings and desires with regard to the facts you already know. Instead of giving you a lecture on the importance of staying warm, Lewis builds a fire and says, “Here—feel this. Doesn’t that feel good?” You can hardly help but love Aslan for the things he says and does. You can hardly help but desire what’s good and right and true. A virtuous life is a life of adventure—of facing challenges, standing firm, rescuing the powerless, righting wrongs. A good adventure story dramatizes that adventure and makes it seem like the sort of life that nobody would want to miss out on. It doesn’t just tell the reader what’s right; it helps the reader to want what’s right. Real life doesn’t always feel like a great adventure. Sometimes doing the right thing is rather dull. Great adventure stories remind us that in the end, the choices we make every day are the stuff of greatness. The world is changed by people who choose to tell the truth, to show kindness, to be courageous. Our natural tendency is to burrow into our own little lives and so lose perspective on what really matters and what’s really true. Our good deeds start to seem irrelevant, and our bad deeds start to seem like they’re no big deal. We all need to step outside ourselves now and then—perhaps to try out another, better self, or perhaps, as David did, to see our own situation from another viewpoint.

Is there a qualitative difference between learning a song from your Grandfather and downloading a song from iTunes, from getting a recipe online and pulling out the yellowing paper of an old, family recipe? Ken Myers answers in the affirmative, channeling C.S. Lewis when he discusses the need for thoughtful Christians to consider not only content in what we appreciate in art, but also how we receive it. Myers, in his excellent book All God’s Children and Blue-Suede Shoes, points out that while Christians have been very sensitive to the content of movies, music and other art forms, we have been less discriminating about how art comes to us and what that process can help us become. We have counted the references to the name of Jesus in music (at rough estimation, repeated about 9,000 times in many Praise and Worship songs) and we have checked for how many so-called “curse words” there are in films, but we have failed to recognize our increasing tendency to fracture and disconnect from our own history and community in how we receive art. Often we see art only as a vehicle for moralism and this has issued in some pretty crummy results. And by art I mean music, painting, drawing, writing, etc. Myers (and Lewis) argue that we need to receive art in a different way than we are being trained to by our culture (increasingly autonomous in the modern era) and I think he is right. “A work of (whatever) art can be either ‘received’ or ‘used.’ When we ‘receive’ it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we ‘use’ it we treat it as assistance for our own activities. The one, to use an old-fashioned example, is like being taken for a bicycle ride by a man who may know roads we have never yet explored. The other is like adding one of those little motor attachments to our own bicycle and then going for one of our familiar rides. These rides in themselves may be good, bad, or indifferent. The ‘uses’ which the many make of the arts may or may not be intrinsically vulgar, depraved, or morbid. That’s as may be. ‘Using’ is inferior to ‘reception’ because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.” C. S. Lewis, quoted by Ken Myers in All God’s Children and Blue-Suede Shoes. There’s nothing wrong with downloading songs from ITunes, but his point is that when we are increasingly detached into a selfish autonomy, we can lose something. And in our downloading we can still choose to ‘receive’ or to ‘use’ the art. This is why places like the Rabbit Room are so helpful to many of us ordinary people. Here we meet Andrew Peterson, Eric Peters and Ron Block (etc.) in a way we wouldn’t only through their songs. I think this helps us receive the art in a way that limits selfishness, autonomy and seeing it as mere utility and encourages the incorporation of community. It’s important not just what we receive, but how we receive it. We should, as Ken Myers says, talk about and practice more considered receiving and less mere consumption. In this way Andrew’s vision for the Rabbit Room is profoundly helpful to us. Allow me to make it clear again that I do not think downloading songs is “bad.” I do it all the time (there’s a real moral test for you, sheesh). And let me remind you to check out the Rabbit Room podcast at ITunes and do a positive review (this should be easily done if you take the few minutes to receive with your ears Eric Peters’ beautiful words in Episode 4). This concern for receiving things thoughtfully goes for everything in our lives, well beyond art only. We receive food from many sources, but ultimately from the hand of God giving daily bread. It is not as direct as manna was for the children of Israel, but it is no less from God. Dr. Gene Veith is helpful when he uncovers for us the doctrine of vocation that Luther championed. Luther said that “God is hidden in vocation.” This means that he is present in all the good we have been given. And this should change the way we receive and consume. We have a Father, and when we are not thankful it is a serious family issue. Rebellion is like witchcraft. This may be part of why the Apostle Paul (and really so much of Scripture) equates being ungrateful with the vilest sins. So let’s be thankful people. Let us be people who receive from God the good from his hand, and who do not despise his discipline (knowing that even that is from love). We should be wary of being polluted by the world. We should guard our hearts against the deceptive encroachment of soul-destroying and joyless sin. But let us add to our considerations how we receive and remember with thankfulness from whom we receive it.

The other night my wife and I had the opportunity to see Charlie Peacock in concert.  The Art*Music*Justice tour, featuring Sarah Groves, Derek Webb, Sandra McCracken, Brandon Heath and Charlie, had an off day in Kansas City.  So Charlie set up a house show with just him and his piano in the upstairs art gallery of the world’s most perfect Christian bookstore, Signs of Life, in downtown Lawrence, Kansas.  (No kidding.  Not a Scripture mint to be found, but huge sections on art, history, classics and local writers.  There’s one wall devoted to the puritans, and another to Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor and the like.  Dangerous.) That record was West Coast Diaries, Volume 2.  There are three volumes total—each pretty different from the others, all very solid.  But Volume 2 has a timeless quality that keeps me coming back even 18 years later.  Charlie just recently remastered and reissued this record, and if you have not added this disc to your library, you might want to.  It’s good.  Real good. Charlie has long been one of Nashville’s premiere producers and song-writers.  He’s a songwriter’s song writer, a producer’s producer.  His studio records are rich, thoughtful, well-made works of art.  More than that, he is a man who has generously invested much of his ability and influence in developing young artists—mentoring them to be thinking people, constantly honing not just their craft, but their minds, their creative process and their devotion to Christ too. While Charlie continues to produce excellent art and artists, I must talk about West Coast Diaries Volume 2, at least to some degree, in the past tense because what it captures is something we had for a while, but will never have again—the Charlie Peacock Acoustic Trio, consisting of Charlie, Jimmy A on guitar and the late Vince Ebo singing back-up.  Jimmy was an artistically perfect fit, flowing effortlessly in and out of Charlie’s improvisational manner.  And Vince added an atmospheric beauty with his vocal style and range.  His talent remains so utterly distinct that I have never heard anything even close to the way that man used his voice as an instrument.  I miss him.  I look forward to hearing him sing again. Volume 2 is elegant, simple, sparse and in a category by itself.  It is short, only 8 tracks.  And basic, just vocals with guitar on six tracks, piano on the other two.  But what is captured in those basic elements over that brief span of time is something that was and remains captivatingly inspired.  If you know the record, you know what I’m talking about. To see this trio live was special.  They had a way of creating great moments where the whole room was swept up in a syncopated flow that left me awestruck not just by the performers and their skill, but by music in general.  It wasn’t just that you had a talented songwriter in an intimate format.  It wasn’t even that you had three gifted musicians all performing on the same record.  What makes this record one I keep coming back to over all these years comes from how the three of them fit together as one and somehow managed to capture it on tape—which seems almost impossible to do.  They played off each other without ever missing a beat.  They were seamless.  They were beautiful together. West Coast Diaries, Volume 2 is the only studio record the Charlie Peacock Acoustic Trio left us, and I think it very faithfully delivers even now the rarified air they hovered in as a group.  It is a snapshot of an ensemble we will never see again, not as it was.  And to my ears, the remastered version has an even livelier feel than the original, which stands just fine on its own. (If you have the old version, the remastered one has an extended version of Down in the Lowlands– an additional 60 seconds of Charlie and Vince riffing.  There is also a live recording of the trio on iTunes from a show in the Netherlands.)

You know you’re in for a great night of music when the first half of the show features Square Peg Alliance members Jeremy Casella, Andy Osenga, and Andrew Peterson playing in the round. That’s how the release show for the last album from JJ Heller, The Pretty and the Plain, started out. And the album lived up to the expectations set by that evening. I bought more copies of The Pretty and the Plain to give away as gifts than I did any other CD last year. On Painted Red, JJ and Dave continue exploring the themes they’ve touched on in their earlier projects, as the opening lines of the first song on the album, “Save Me”, attest: Living / am I really living / or am I just existing / hiding away // Danger / the world is full of danger / but if I never try to go outside / my heart will waste away // Come and save me / You’re the only / source of all the peace I need / come and save me / come and save me. They’ve co-written with a couple other songwriters this time around, including Andy Osenga and Katie Herzig, resulting in a solid collection of songs. I dropped by the studio one July afternoon for a couple hours while they were recording, and, reading through some of the lyrics, what stood out to me were the opening lines to “Back Home”: Don’t let your eyes get used to darkness / the light is coming soon. / Don’t let your heart get used to sadness / put your hope in what is true.  But I think my favorite lyrics on the album are the closing words, the very last line in the last song “Painted Red”, written by JJ. It’s a short song, only 2:13, and the last 50 seconds of that is just “ooh-ing,” with Andy Osenga joining Dave and JJ, sans instruments, for the last :26 seconds. The last thing you hear before it begins to wind down is “Hope means holding on to You, grace means You’re holding me too”. Indeed. “Hope means holding on to You, grace means You’re holding me too.” Here’s the link where you can download Painted Red before the end of the month. Go download your copy and tell your friends. And be sure to check out JJ’s blog, The Lovely Little Things, for music and touring news, posts about JJ’s sewing projects, and stories about their new baby, due in a couple of weeks.

Have you ever been on the receiving end of truly gracious hospitality? How about on the giving end? For Andi Ashworth, the art of caregiving is something that came alive in her. She said, “I discovered that, with design, intent and hard work, I could contribute to a story laced with the true, the good, and the beautiful in the lives of my family and friends.” In her book Real Love for Real Life, Andi contends that caregiving is more than a second-tier Christian duty. It is a “grand invitation to serve others with beauty, imagination, and love to which God calls us.” And according to the Bible, she is so right. The Apostle Peter wrote, “Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” 1 Peter 4:8-11 A story. When my brother and I were in college, my parents signed up to provide a foster home for kids who had been removed from the worst of situations. Their first call was for a 13-year-old girl who had suffered much at the hands of those who were supposed to care for her. Here’s how she came to live in our home. One day she woke up, got a bowl of cereal, heard a knock on the door, answered it, and there before her stood a social worker and a couple of police officers, come to remove her from her situation. By 3:00PM that same afternoon, she sat in our living room as the social worker tried to explain that she was safe now and this would be her new home until they got everything worked out. I remember how mom and dad called my brother and me to make sure we’d be okay with this. We went to a church which loved to remind us that whatever we do “for the least of these, that we do unto Christ.” (Mt 25:40) So of course, we offered no objections. But neither of us knew what this would mean for our lives. Up until then, we were our parents only two kids—boys 14 months apart, now both in college. But here, all at once we had a 13-year-old sister. For the summers we lived at home, we learned quickly that we were in over our heads. My parents were remarkable people. Still are. One thing they modeled with unflinching conviction and unflappable grace was that hospitality was not a second tier responsibility for the Christian. In fact, my parents regularly put my brother and me in the presence of people who were hurting, alone and in trouble. So it is fascinating to me that all the things Peter could have put in his mini-list of Christian duties in the text above, we find glad-hearted hospitality. Hospitality can seem to be a sucker’s game. We go into it thinking, for example, “How hard could it be to open my home to someone in trouble?” But then they chain smoke menthol cigarette’s with the filters broke off in our garage because they know the rule about smoking in the house, but there’s three feet of snow on the ground outside. Or we say, “We’ll host a get together for the young families in the neighborhood,” only to watch the neighborhood kids destroy our clean home. Somewhere along the way, we begin to think we’re getting wise this sucker’s game. But not wanting to appear inhospitable, we develop some rules—fail-safes to keep people in our homes, but not disrupting our homes. Hospitality is not for suckers. It’s for Christians. But apparently according to Peter, it makes the heart want to grumble enough that the call to show hospitality without grumbling made it into the canon of Scripture. It seems as if Peter is saying, “Expect hospitality will put you out a bit. It will cost you. Don’t grumble.”  Grumble about what? Is Peter talking about grumbling about the work involved in cleaning the house or cooking a meal or making a bed, or is he talking about people and their neediness? Probably all of the above. But when you consider that the aim of the Christian life is to glorify God through His Son Jesus Christ, of course hospitality would be central. Jesus played host to the most needy, desperate, ill-equipped collection of have-nots ever. We are all and have been sick, in prison (real or imagined), hungry, thirsty and displaced. Jesus came to where His people were and are and took us in, gave us what we needed and did for us what we could not do for ourselves. He took us from our various forms of vagrancy and gave us a home with Him. The call to hospitality is a call to mirror what He had modeled. Andi’s wonderful little book on the art and work of caring for people is a book that does not grumble.  She takes time to explore the idea of caring as a calling from God that is at the same time fruitful and inefficient, part spontaneous, part ceremony, without season, across generations and always done within our personal limitations of time, resources and abilities. But it is a rich life because it is a life that mirrors the true Caregiver. My wife and I have personally been on the receiving end of Andi’s care (and her husband’s), and we say without hesitation that their investment in our lives has had more to do with the rich lives we live now than either of them could know. Her book reads like a conversation across the kitchen table, and you will learn about loving people well as you learn about how God has loved you well. That means time with this book will be time well spent.

Maybe I’ve found a good reason to justify my pack rat inclination. For years I have maintained three dresser drawers, a suit case, and an old trunk–full of so-called memorabilia–spanning over thirty years now. I rarely venture in there. These archives contain an old autograph book, boxes of letters from old camp friends, many of which have antiquated eight cent stamps on the envelope, pictures of people I haven’t seen in years, essays from college, journals, greeting cards, Bible study notes, awards, some dirt in a jar from Camp Merrill, home-spun novels, and a partridge in a pear tree. I’ve always held these items back, avoiding the intermittent temptation to dredge up the past. Collecting life’s “treasures” has usually seemed more relevant than reviewing them. Still, deep in the recesses of my cranium, I’ve always known that someday I would dive into the pool of my past. So I’ve held this stuff back, like a miser might hoard Benjamins for a rainy day. But now, as the years zip by, like a dark tunnel around a fast moving train—and I find myself closing in on the big 5-0 milestone—increasingly, this thought flashes before my eyes: “If not now, when?” So one recent late night, I decided to take the plunge. With a sense of adventure, I opened one of the drawers, reached deep into the middle of a pile of papers, and pulled the first item my fingers locked on to. Supressing a sneeze, I blew the dust away from the April, 1974 version of a publication called Truth Magazine. Truth was published out of Spokane, WA by The Voice of Elijah, Inc., a non-profit corporation. Carl A. Parks was the Editor and Publisher. It was published bi-monthly and a subscription cost $2.00 for 12 issues. Seriously. This is the epitome of a Jesus Movement publication from that era. There were many of these publications, often handed out on street corners of downtown metro areas. The articles in this particular issue include the conversion story of Charles Colson, a man who was part of the Richard Nixon administration, who found Jesus after the Watergate debacle. Another feature is about The Ferris High School “Revival.” There’s a story about UFO’s and an article pondering whether we are really living in the last days (apparently not, since all living Christians are still attached to the earth some thirty years later). The regular features include a page for pen pals, letters to the editor, a women’s page and several others. I had a pen pal, a girl who’s name I’ve long forgotten, which I may have found in the pen pal section. The print ads feature bumper stickers and buttons that say things like, “One Way, Jesus,” “Not Religion … a Relationship with Jesus,” “Read Your Bible, It’ll Scare the Hell Out of You,” “God Loves You,” “Truckin’ With Jesus,” and “One Way.” The entire back page is an ad for The Wilson McKinley Record Albums, a Jesus Music band that was part of early Jesus Music movement. Jesus Music was the precurser to CCM and all of the tree limb off-shoots of contemporary music written and produced by Christians today. For a tax deductable donation of $4.95, you get The Wilson McKinley album of your choice, “On Stage,” “Spirit of Elijah,” or “Heaven’s Gonna be a Blast.” For a tax deductable donation of $10.00, you get all three! As I turned the pages, the memories came flooding back. As captured by Time Magazine and other national publications, in 1974, The Jesus Movement was in full swing. It was fueled by Jesus Music and the deep passion of young people that caught the wave. Emanating from within the hippie counterculture, the Jesus Movement began on the West Coast, and found it’s way into the nooks and crannies of mainstream youth groups, one of which was the Baptist-Presbyterian Church in Valley, Nebraska, my home church. I was an unhip small town Nebraska boy, but the emerging cultural revolution insidiously wrapped its tenticles around me. I ordered me some of those neat stickers. I didn’t grow long hair, but I hung out with many that did. I frequented the outdoor Jesus Music festivals. I learned to play guitar and wrote some bad songs. I carried a living Bible, called “The Way,” with notes written in the margins, and a rainbow of color-coded colors to highlight passages that were “far out.” I felt rebelliously cool when I pasted a bunch of those cool stickers all over my Bible.  Relationships were filled with passion and joy. A giddy, unrestrained joy permeated the stream of consiousness conversations that free-flowed among my friends. Inhibitions were few. Peace that passes human understanding softened and strengthened every new day. Warm hugs and honest, sincere smiles were shared indiscriminately. The music we sang and heard then is an anchor which tethers memories of those days to the emotion that was generated. I still remember discovering the band Love Song, one of my first musical discoveries of the the era. As I looked at the rustic artistic album cover at Zondervan Bookstore in the Westroads, I intuitively knew that I would love the music contained inside. Love Song was the right band at the right time. New believers themselves, they wrote simply, sincerely, and convincingly of their love for Jesus. It’s hard to overstate how intensely Love Song’s music resonated with those of us that experienced it at that time and place. To those that were there, it still resonates today, like an old star fueled by the combustion of time and the collective memories of those of us that were there. The debut, Love Song, and to a lesser extent, the follow up Final Touch, are as close to perfect records as I’ve ever heard. The music was part of the soundtrack of my young life. Lush, intricate harmonies, home-spun lyrics, and acoustic guitars fill the grooves of the vinyl. The debut Love Song is innovative, enchanting, and in its own way, profound. It’s not unusual to hear former Jesus People describe he album as “pure” and “inspired.” According to the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music, written by Mark Allan Powell, Love Song is considered the most important Christian rock band of all time. Some refer to this album as “anointed.” The band connected with its audience in a way which is rarely seen. The mainstream equivalent may be The Grateful Dead and its Deadheads in terms of the loyal connection it found with its fans in a concert setting. I think the word is “passion.” We were inspired by a convergence of life, love, music, and revival, a truly unique period in recent history. It was a curious time in which God orchestrated surprise after surprise, using–as He always has–unlikely earthen vessels: Lonnie Frisbee, Chuck Smith, Chuck Girard, Larry Norman, Duane Pederson, Barry McGuire, Second Chapter of Acts, Petra, Scott Ross, Larry Black, Resurrection Band, Phil Keaggy, Randy Stonehill, Randy Matthews, Mark Heard, Andraé Crouch and the Disciples, and the late Keith Green and Larry Norman. To those that were there, these names evoke vivid memories and deep emotion. It’s odd that one such memento from my past would inspire such a vast flood of thoughts and emotion. I wonder what other jewels await me in the hinterland of my past, covered with dust, waiting to be stirred. Like carefully constructed words inside an old book sitting on the shelf waiting to be read, will all the relics of my life come rushing forth with such vim and vigor when I mine the depths of my drawers again? And why do I care? A good friend once ask me, “Why do you hang on to all this stuff?” He meant no harm, asking the question quite dispassionately, but I somehow felt a little naked, like he suspected something about me that wasn’t especially flattering. Why indeed do I hold such inanimate objects in such high esteem? Why do I discuss the past with such a sense of romance? Why can’t I bring myself to cast these items off, like an empty milk jug on trash day? As I cling to my past, like a bus driver’s hands cling to the steering wheel as he navigates an icy winter road, I want my life to matter. I want your life to matter. My earnest hope, indeed my wavering, yet firm belief, is that our lives matter more than we can imagine. It’s what I believe. It’s the way I want to live. But if my wife ever throws that stuff away, I’ll kill her. “Everything matters if anything matters at all, Everything matters, no matter how big, no matter how small.” –Pierce Pettis from “God Believes in You”