The concert had been a sellout. It turned out to be an enthusiastic audience of all ages with waves of laughter and applause between the songs, the laughter, and the moments of deep spiritual awareness. A great night!
By the time we were finished tearing down displays in the lobby, putting equipment in the bus, and changing our clothes in the dressing room, the building was empty. All the lights were out except for one lone lightbulb dangling by a frayed cord from the ceiling above the stage. As we carried our bags across the stage from the dressing rooms to the back door, we stopped for a moment and talked about the evening. The single light and the huge silent room were such a contrast to the spotlights and the excitement of an hour ago.
“It was a great night,” one of the performers said. “But the question is, do the things we sang and said then work now?”
There is always a danger that politicians will start believing their own press releases, that kids will not be able to distinguish fairy tales from reality, that performers and actors will not be capable of separating the stage and the floodlights from their Monday mornings and daylight.
Bill and I have spent a great deal of time with aspiring young artists, not so much to help them “make it,” but in the hopes of teaching them some things that may save them from themselves when they do make it.
In our culture, talent often results in what the world would call “success,” but it has been our experience that success is often much harder to deal with than failure. In fact, failure is often good for us human beings; we learn from our failures. While we can learn from our failures, we’re more often destroyed by success.
The Palm Sunday story in the Bible carries a very modern application. It’s easy to praise the Lord in a crowd of cheering worshipers, singing songs and “lifting holy hands.” But when the dust clears, and the music stops, and the lights are reduced to a bare lightbulb dangling from a frayed cord, what then? Is our praise as convincing when we’re alone in an elevator? Does it “preach” when we’re the only person in the congregation?
I once heard someone say about a Christian speaker: “I’d be more impressed if I ever heard him pray when he wasn’t on stage.”
My father was a pastor, and I often heard him quote 1 Corinthians 9:27, Paul’s high standard, which my dad held up for himself: “But discipline my body and bring it into subjection: lest, that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should become a castaway” (NKJV). That verse was like a caution light that flashed over my parents’ ministry. It is a caution light for me. It is a warning for Bill’s and my ministry of writing and speaking and parenting and living in our little town. What we do when the stage is dark and bare is so much more important than what we do when it’s bright and full.
When our traveling groups meet for a time of prayer before concerts, we have often prayed that we would be as real at McDonald’s after the concert as we seem during the concert, that our lives with the stagehands and the auditorium’s staff would be as convincing as our lives beyond the spotlight.
When it is all said and done, I hope our children and our parents, our neighbors, and the people with whom we work will see our praise lived out much more articulately than we are ever able to express in words and in print.
May our failures and shortcomings be redeemed by the sweet love and grace of Jesus so that His spirit makes a more lasting memory than our fragile humanity. It was this deep desire and that night on the empty stage that inspired this song. Sandy was there that night, and it was she that first recorded the song.
