I Don't Belong

Life on the road is hard work. Contrary to what most ­people think, those who make their living in a portable profession do not have a life of all glamour and glory. Travel is full of inconveniences and frustrations. One needs to learn to accept disappointing cancellations and long waits in airports or in truck stops for repairs as par for the course. Sleeping in crook-necked positions while leaning against a building pillar or, if one is fortunate, a friendly shoulder; eating food you ­don’t quite recognize; adjusting to performing the “routine of toilet” in less than convenient or sanitary surroundings—these are all part of the traveler’s life.

Add to these realities the assorted artistic temperaments of a troupe grouped together because they love to sing, but not necessarily because they are compatiible in other ways,  and you could have the makings of a civil war. At the very least, let me say from experience, traveling together gives ­people ample opportunity to get to know and test the validity of each other’s Christian graces. It also develops some amazing friendships and calls forth some qualities in human character that are tantamount to sainthood.

Bill and I have been traveling as a part of our work for more than fifty years. We have had dozens—maybe, by now, hundreds—of other artists and writers, sound engineers and technicians share with us station wagons, vans, motor homes, buses, and planes for extended periods of time. We have, in that time, known a few divas, but mostly we have become well acquainted with some beautiful human beings whose confessions and professions of faith were most articulately made by the quality of their servant attitudes in the pressured and unguarded moments of life, on and off the road.

When I think of validity, perhaps no name comes so quickly to mind as that of Buddy Greene, with whom this song was written. Buddy is a man of God in the most practical and unpious sense. One of Bill’s and my all-time favorite ways to spend the hours on the road is to engage in a deep, honest discussion of a great life issue or theological concept. The truth of the adage “iron sharpens iron” is most evident when two or more ­people will allow each other to agree and disagree—sometimes heatedly—on the safe soil of common respect and mutual acceptance.

Buddy Greene is one of the travelers who most loves to plumb the depths of the things of God. One road discussion with him was precipitated by an article in a newspaper about the murder and sexual abuse of a child. Buddy and I were talking about how sick the world had become and how depraved human beings can act without Jesus. That turned to a discussion of how even Christian groups seem to twist and distort the simple message of love, grace, and forgiveness Jesus came to live out for us. The “politicizing” and “culturalizing” of the Gospel as a way to polarize believers seemed to us such a contradiction of Jesus’ words: “Come unto me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

“I feel sometimes like an alien,” I eventually said to Buddy. “And I’m not so sure I even want to ‘belong’ in a world where babies are abused and the powerful are rewarded for misusing the weak. When we start to ‘fit in’ in such a world, some caution light should start to blink in our souls.”

“Well, you are an alien,” Buddy said. “We all are. We’re strangers and pilgrims. But remember, an alien is not a person without a country. Aliens are citizens, but not of the country they are in for a while. We, too, are citizens. It’s just that our citizenship ­isn’t here.”

A few miles after our discussion, I gave Buddy a lyric I had finished. He took it home and called me later. “I think ­I’ve got some music to your song,” he said. “Want to hear it?” Writers often play music or read lyrics over the phone. To the tune he’d just created, Buddy sang me the lyric I’d given him. I knew it was right. “Like a glove, Buddy!” I said when he was finished.

Buddy himself recorded the song on a project he appropriately named “Sojourner’s Song,” the original title of the song. I still like that title best, though the song is now known as “I ­Don’t Belong.” I like “Sojourner’s Song” because the truth is, we do belong. We are citizens. It’s just that our citizenship is in another country to which we are ­traveling. And since this world is not our home anyway, we may as well love and give and live while we’re here as if ­we’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.

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What Time is It?

Clocks of every kind fill every nook and cranny of every home.  Most homes have some kind of time piece in every room, and most of the people who live in those rooms have the current time displayed on smart watches and cellphones for any region in the world.  We are a time-driven people; we are obsessive about checking the time. Cell phones lord it over our every waking moment. Ovens, microwaves, bedside digital clocks flash the time all day and all night.  Décor clocks make statements on every wall and hallway. The tyranny of time!

But I long for timepieces that mean something.  My father, a pastor of small churches all his life, always wanted a grandfather clock.  He and Mother saved for years to finally get one for each other one year for Christmas.  Our children remember the ritual they had of winding it on Sunday each week and loved the comforting sound of it when they spent weekends at their house while we were out on the road singing.  Benjy and Melody now have that clock in the corner of their piano room.  Its music is now part of the natural habitat of their children who take for granted the sound of the chimes that mark the hours as they pass. They wind their clock on Sunday, just as their great grandparents did all those years when their parents were growing up. 

Bill and I, too, have a grandfather clock, given to us as a very special Christmas gift from those who worked with us to publish and send out our music.  It’s a real presence in our family room.  I, too, wind it on Sunday.

At our cabin in the woods where I go to write is a clock that looks like a china dinner plate.  I keep it because it was given to us years ago by Dino and Cheryl Kartsonakis; I think of them when I see it.  And the crystal clock in our living room was actually a very special award given to us by ASCAP in New York, while the one on our roll-top desk was a gift from Anderson University for just that spot next to the antique writing pens and bottles of old-fashioned ink.

The Christmas he was one year old, I gave to our grandson Liam a clock that looked like “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie”.  He loved it when I sang “Sing a Song of Six-pence” to him, so this clock from the famous Indiana artist FB Fogg found a place in his nursery.

Our daughter Amy and her husband Andrew once had a little place in the woods in quaint Brown County, Indiana.  Amy is the one in our family that was always at war with time and hated schedules that overruled the inclinations of her heart, so when I asked her what they would like for their cottage she said, “I want clocks that don’t work or have no hands.  I want a collection of them on the wall.  That will be the one place where our family can lose track of time!”

Don’t you have to just love that?  

Well, I loved it, too!  So when we were in Carmel, California, on vacation, I discovered in a lovely French country shop a dainty bracelet made of thin gold and silver faces of antique watches.  I just couldn’t resist it.  It had Amy’s name all over it!  We gave it to her for her birthday. None of the hands move on these tiny watch faces—Amy’s kind of timepiece.

When Benjy was a teen-ager, he asked me to listen to part of an album by the Canadian rock group Triumph. On it was a brilliant musical study called “Time Canon,” a trilogy of songs about time.  The first was a cut called “Time Goes By”.  There was a cut called “Killing Time”, which, if I recall, was a song about the young who think they have all the time in the world to kill.  But gradually, there is a turn in the trilogy and the meaning of “killing” turns from a lighthearted comment about killing time into an adjective meaning time that kills!  Loneliness and too much time becomes lethal, killing the soul. Unforgettable. 

 I think of that trilogy of songs now that social distancing, too much time alone, and isolation from the happy interaction of family gatherings become a strange new norm.  People were not meant to be alone.  Children need children, squealing down the hillside.  Families need to be crammed around tables, sharing turkey and pumpkin pie, telling the hilarious stories to the new generation, laughing their heads off together. We need each other!

I think again about the two kinds of time:  Chronos and Kairos. The first is earth time, the kind of time that schedules are built on, the kind of time that runs our lives and keeps up the pressure and causes the wheels of commerce to turn with relentless urgency.  Any chronological time-keeping is the product of this earth and its value system. Chronos gets us to work and to school and to church and sets the framework of our days.

Then there is God’s time.  Amazing how something like a worldwide pandemic can stop down what we all thought was totally essential, and make us reconsider what is vitally important after all. God’s time, Kairos, is eternal and not the victim of earth’s systems, values, or pressures.  I am coming to believe that it may be our mission on this earth to turn what Chronos time we have here in this life into something eternal—to make something “Kairos” out of the hours of time we are given on this earth, something that will transcend time and space and go on after time and space shall end.

And I visit the clocks of my life again.  It is more than their ability to tell me what time it is; it is to remind me the value of the moments we have.  It is Liam winding my parents grandfather clock on Sunday because it matters.  It is making conscious note that Sunday isn’t just another day to be driven by our cell phones.  It is the day to make something of the time, put some eternity in it by the way we dish up the pot roast after worship and have that lingering conversation with the teen-agers and the little ones, and the old ones, and the usually-too-busy-ones and the college students who know more right now than they will ever know again in their lives.  It is listening—and seeing in everyone’s insight a kernel of truth and that is a treasure we may not have recognized before.  And it is that “something,” that Kairos sitting right here in the middle of our Chronos—right here in this moment on this planet at this time with these people we love, barely aware that the clock is chiming away marking something, well, timeless!

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The Water of Life on Earth's Shore

The great Creator who breathed galaxies into existence began the creation of our world by speaking into the swirling, formless void of nothingness, “Let it be!”  Because He is light, His first “let it be” was “light.”  And there was light.  Then He separated the light from darkness and gave them both names:  day and night.

Then He called the firm particles out from the misty wetness, drawing the firm together and separating what was solid from the liquid.  He named the firm firmament and the liquid water—water below, vapor above and land in between.  His first foundational work was done.  There was light.  There was night.  There was earth, and there were seas.  “Good work!  Necessary work!” He breathed.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

Eons later, this great Creator would choose to plant Himself on this planet.  He longed for His created work to know Him, especially the creation He had named man.  But this would require an enormous risk of limitation.  Life itself would have to distill itself into the smallest denomination of life of which this tiny planet was capable:  a single cell.  This cosmic singularity must become a single cell to combine with a human cell.  This great God would become one of us in our most vulnerable form—a helpless baby.

The story of this Creator-God reaching all this unfathomable distance is a wonder that stretches credulity.  Yet, it is simple enough on its surface for a child to understand and so profound that the most brilliant and most schooled of minds cannot truly comprehend. So all, the simple and the brilliant, must hold the mystery with an open hand like one holds for a moment a snowflake on an eyelash in the moonlight.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

How fitting that this human-encased God-essence, pure and true, walked in sandaled feet the sandy shores of a small sea—a place where firmament and water come together—telling the secrets of the mystery in earthy stories filled with metaphor, so that we who were made of the very earth He called forth could have inklings, now and again, of a truth beyond words and a Life that transcends the living out of our days.

This Holy child that was born in earth’s simplest of circumstances never got very far from a seashore where water and grains of firmament meet.  There He taught with stories that explanations could never impart, so that we ourselves could transcend time and space, earth and water to recognize the essential kinship between eternity and this moment.

Click below to listen to the podcast “The Story You Never Heard” featuring Gloria Gaither.

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Best Story of All

I am a child.  I must be four or five years old.  It is Wednesday night, and we are having what we call prayer meeting but what is really, at our little church in the tiny farming village where my father pastors, an informal hour of singing, testimonies and a short study of a passage of scripture.  The person “leading the singing” is not a “musician” or a “minister of music.”  He is a farmer who has finished his chores, taken a shower, put on a clean cotton shirt and “work pants” and eaten a simple supper with his family before heading off “into town” to the service.  His wife plays the piano as those gathered in the little white church by Michigan State Road M-60 begin to sing.

I am singing, too.  I know the familiar words by heart to the first song “When We All Get to Heaven.”  But I have my finger in page 444, marking my favorite just in case the song leader says at the end of this song, “Does anyone have a request?”

I will be quick.  I am ready.  “Page 444!”  I say before anyone else even has time to thumb through the hymnal.

“Turn to page 444,” the song leader says with a twinkle in his eye and a smile in my direction.  I am suddenly bathed in the warm embrace of acceptance, love, and confirmation.  And I sing – do I ever sing! – at the top of my voice.

I love to tell the story of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and His glory, of Jesus and His love;
I love to tell the story because I know ‘tis true;
It satisfies my longing as nothing else can do.

Now I am a songwriter myself.  I have written my life’s journey into nearly a thousand lyrics to the wonderfully accessible tunes my husband has heard in his head.  I’ve watched amazed as my words of praise, discovery, question, and revelation have found their way into other persons’ lives, words that at the time seemed so personal to our pilgrimage that I couldn’t imagine them helping someone else.

And I have come to believe that we as a body of struggling, growing, emerging believers need a shared history with God to stockpile against the winters of our lives and the dark nights of the soul.  Like the Israelites who carried stones from the bed of the parted Jordan River, we need to have resources in our possessions with which we can stoop to build an altar in celebration of those times when God “showed up” in our distress.  We need to be able to point to these altars – those Ebenezers along our path – when “Satan would buffet” and say to each other and our children, “I know God is with us!  He met us there, and there and there.  I know He will be faithful in this hour, too.”

The words I learned as a child flowed over me like a warm shower.  I loved the sound of them, the embrace of the voices around me singing them.  But decades have passed since then.  The words and the tune that glued them to my memory have been investigated and scrutinized under the glaring eye of reality.  What have I discovered? A resource of truth richer and deeper and broader then I ever could have imagined.  As the years have passed, life experiences have spotlighted the validity of different verses for me. 

 At this juncture of my journey, this is currently my favorite:

I love to tell the story for those who know it best
Seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest;
And when in scenes of glory I sing a new, new song,
‘Twill be its old, old story that I have loved so long.

When we tell the eternal story, let’s tell more than the punch line.  We need the whole song, all the verses and the choruses to serve us as our own story unfolds because, trust me, life is hard, but God is good.

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