Love & Thunder

Canaan Bound from "Love & Thunder" by Andrew Peterson & Ben Shive

Sarah, take me by my arm
Tomorrow we are Canaan bound
Where westward sails the golden sun
And Hebron's hills are amber crowned

So bid your troubled heart be still
The grass, they say, is soft and green
The trees are tall and honey-filled
So, Sarah, come and walk with me

Like the stars across the heavens flung
Like water in the desert sprung
Like the grains of sand, our many sons
Oh, Sarah, fair and barren one
Come to Canaan, come

I trembled at the voice of God
A voice of love and thunder deep
With love He means to save us all
And Love has chosen you and me

Long after we are dead and gone
A thousand years our tale be sung
How faith compelled and bore us on
How barren Sarah bore a son
So come to Canaan, come

Where westward sails the golden sun
And Hebron's hills are amber crowned
Oh, Sarah, take me by my arm
Tomorrow we are Canaan bound

So begins, Andrew Peterson’s album “Love & Thunder”. I used to pick up a lot of music by Christian artists (“Contemporary Christian Music” or whatever it’s called). Now I seldom, do ‘cause I’m not sure their ‘voice’, the words they speak resonate with what I need to hear, or what I want to listen to. But Andrew’s voice (& that of his other collaborators) constantly moves me, constantly speaks of a faith that is deeper that words on pages or moral codes or lifestyles….

…this song woos me… it brings me back thousands of years to one of the first pilgrims, one of the first caught on the journey of faith….it brings me back to a simple man & his bride, to a man frail & feeble like any man, with a heart rich & strong, a man with dreams & longings to find that ‘better country’…

I listened to this song again today after a conversation at work between a Christian, a Sikh, & someone with fairly liberal, left-leaning, new age-ish beliefs. The talk began about relationships, about the Christian admiring this couple who were not going to kiss until they were engaged & how it was great that they were taking steps to not have sex before marriage. For the others, the reaction ranged from mild acceptance or tolerance of this view to a reaction as if someone had suddenly sprouted a second head. Somewhere in there, I tried to speak, tried to bring in some levels of reason to bridge the gaps between the various sides/ideologies, but, in a crowd of extroverts, I wasn’t forceful enough or as fast on my feet & my voice got lost in the shuffle of people talking about ideas of belief, of right & wrong, good & bad…..

….I feel often like I’m trying to bridge the gap. My dad & my brother argue about Muslims a lot. Dad sees the injustices caused by Islamic terrorists & the way that innocents are killed. He then starts to paint all Muslims with the same brush & has nothing good to say about them. My brother knows good & honest & kind Muslim people, he is friends with them & he loves their culture & their people. My brother sees the injustices done against Muslims, the way they have been all lumped into the category of ‘terrorist’ or ‘extremist’. And so my brother speaks out against this. My dad thinks my brother’s been in university too long & ‘infected’ by liberal, left-wing ideals. My brother figures my dad is listening to too much right-wing media & only seeing one side of the story.

And for me I see two people I love, two people with amazing hearts, two people with hearts that ache to see justice done & the oppressed go free…. I see two hearts with a common goal, but because they’re only looking at the one side of things, they don’t meet in the middle… and so I try to ‘advocate’, try to explain one’s position to the other and vice versa…. And yeah, so far it’s only achieved mixed results.

I try to advocate between the churched & the un-churched. I try to explain stuff about God, about salvation, about the church to those who don’t have a church background. I try to bring it into terms that make sense, terms that are the vernacular of the day instead of the ‘church-speak’ or ‘christian-ese’ that we church folk find ourselves trapped in. I try to apologize for the stupid or evil things the church does; try to smooth things over. Most of all, I try to make sense of it all to people who don’t have the background. I try to tell stories of men & women like Abraham & Sarah, stories of simple people who encounter an incredible God in the middle of average lives…..

…and I try to remind the church-folk of who they are & who they were. I try to help break down the walls of “us” and “them”, of “saint” and “sinner”. I try to remind people that we are all “sinners”, all addicts hell-bent on destroying ourselves, selfish people who are trying to grab their piece of the pie instead of allowing love to embrace us & to give us all we’re really longing for. I try to remind us that, at every persons core, there is still good, that there is some part of them that reflects God’s image, reflects part of His heart. I try to remind the churched that they are not so much unlike the unchurched – that the polish of ‘dressing up for Sunday’ won’t hide the aching in their heart or the treachery & longing in their own souls. I hope by doing this that somehow the churched will see that the un-churched are not enemies to be attacked, but people like themselves, people who need to be loved….

I’ve tried to advocate between men & women. I’ve tried to treat women with respect, to remind them that they are valued, that they are more than images, more than ‘things’, that they are people of worth & value. I’ve tried to remind them that they are precious. I’ve tried to remind men to adjust their vision, to see the whole of a woman, to answer the call of their own hearts that longs to embrace not some mindless image enslaved to their beck & call, but instead to embrace an equal, to embrace a friend, a partner, someone cherished & respected. I’ve tried to remind both of the great play, the epic story told through every man & every woman on the planet – the heart of Christ willing to lay down His life for His bride, and the heart of the church, the enraptured bride, longing for her groom & embracing Him as a mature partner in love & service…

…but it’s conversations like today that show me just how far the gap is…. How that advocates can’t really do much when we’re all convinced we’re ‘right’ and refuse to listen to the other side. It seems to be our nature as humans to assume that we are right & the rest of the world is clueless… a rather arrogant view if one thinks about it, but we cling to this view nevertheless.

We all talk of looking for truth, but we really only seem to embrace what is true to us – the ‘truth’ we’ve encountered. More than that, I’ve learned that even if one could produce ‘absolute truth’, each person still has the choice to whether or not they want to embrace that ‘truth’… and yeah, I think all of us, men & women, Christian & not-so-christian tend to just make up our minds & refuse to hear what the others have to say….

… and so the voice of the advocates gets lost… or at least mine does… partly because it’s a ‘partial’ or ‘tainted’ voice. As much as I may try to understand others, I’m still pretty limited. I’ll never be a woman (which I’m sort of glad about ‘cause I like being a guy), I’ve grown up in the church my whole life & life with Jesus is really all I’ve known. And so I’m ‘crippled’ in a sense that I will never fully relate, never fully be able to embrace both sides of the divide…. At best, I listen with biased ears & it takes me years to really understand even one small part the ‘other side’…

…this is why Jesus is the one true advocate, the one mediator between God & humanity. Jesus embraced both sides – He was fully God & fully man & could, as Job longed for, take God by the hand & take man by the hand & explain the heart of the one to the heart of the other & could reconcile Father to child & children to Father…..

All of this makes my heart weary, makes me long for the place where peace rules, where love is King…. Like Abraham & Sarah, I long for that better country. That place where we know & are fully known, the place where the lion lies down with the lamb, where there is no sickness, no sadness, no suffering, no death.

And like Abraham, I look over at the seeming bareness of my life & the way the dreams just haven’t worked out yet (including not having a Sarah to share the journey with) & yeah, some moments I wonder if it’s worth carrying on, worth trying again. Though somewhere in there, there is always the voice, calling me to come, wooing me to continue on, to be forever “Canaan bound” and looking for the land where “there is love, love, love, love….”

After the Last Tear Falls from "Love & Thunder" by Andrew Osenga & Andrew Peterson

After the last tear falls
After the last secret's told
After the last bullet tears through flesh and bone
After the last child starves
And the last girl walks the boulevard
After the last year that's just too hard

There is love
Love, love, love
There is love
Love, love, love
There is love

After the last disgrace
After the last lie to save some face
After the last brutal jab from a poison tongue
After the last dirty politician
After the last meal down at the mission
After the last lonely night in prison

There is love
Love, love, love
There is love
Love, love, love
There is love

And in the end, the end is
Oceans and oceans
Of love and love again
We'll see how the tears that have fallen
Were caught in the palms
Of the Giver of love and the Lover of all
And we'll look back on these tears as old tales

'Cause after the last plan fails
After the last siren wails
After the last young husband sails off to join the war
After the last "this marriage is over"
After the last young girl's innocence is stolen
After the last years of silence that won't let a heart open

There is love
Love, love, love
There is love

And in the end, the end is
Oceans and oceans
Of love and love again
We'll see how the tears that have fallen
Were caught in the palms
Of the Giver of love and the Lover of all
And we'll look back on these tears as old tales

'Cause after the last tear falls
There is love