So You Wanna Go Back

I came across the article yesterday via Facebook. Just a short post on the Desiring God blog by Jon Bloom concerning Keith Green. Yesterday was the 28th of July, and the 28th anniversary of the plane crash that took the life of the 28-year-old singer, and DG wanted to mark that anniversary.

I wasn't ever a great fan, or devotee, of Green when he was alive. Mainly, I think, that was not a matter of musical taste but because at that point in my life - especially prior to the age of the web and easy music downloads - I had neither the time nor the money to invest in his music. I am certainly familiar with much of it though, as is anyone who has spent any considerable time in evangelical churches of any persuasion, I'm sure. (Leeks and onions by the Nile, anyone?)

What caught my attention in the Desiring God blog post was this paragraph:

Keith was in love with Jesus in a way that few seemed to be. His passion was the kind I read about in the New Testament. Keith was real. You could tell just by listening to him.  And you could also tell that Keith wasn’t mainly about music, he was about a message. He didn’t care about his career; he cared whether or not people followed Jesus. Keith was all about spreading a passion for the supremacy of Jesus.

I mark my real relationship with Jesus Christ by a summer day just a couple of weeks past 37 years ago now when, at the age of 17, a very real, very demonstrable change occurred as a result of what I know to have been the work of the Spirit of God. Almost from that very day, I knew something of what Bloom means here in his description of Green's passion for Christ. I wanted it, too. For all of my life of faith, the one thing I have wanted above all else is to be completely consumed by Christ, and to live a life that made a tangible difference in bringing the world to worship him. I wanted to be like Jim, Nate, Pete, Roger or Ed - even giving my life for the sake of Christ - or at the very least to live at some imagined cutting edge of mission and ministry that radically altered lives and, therefore, the world.

I'm 54 now, and I never made it there. At least not in the form or fashion I had, however nebulously, imagined I would. The fire never went out, the desire never died, but for reasons far too complicated to describe, most of which revolve around a personality that just never matched the passion, coupled with the inevitable failures of the flesh, no one could ever describe me in terms similar to this picture of Keith Green.

Honestly, I think that I have largely spent the last 10-11 years coming to grips with this reality, trying to figure out what went "wrong", what it all means, and where to go from here. Ironically, as I sat down to write this blog post, I came across an article by Green himself, posted by his wife Melody on the Last Days Ministries web site which she maintains even to this day, that perhaps best describes my conclusion. In writing about all those who would approach him about how to break into the field of Contemporary Christian Music, he said this:

It seems everyone would prefer the "bright lights" of what they think a music ministry would be, rather than the mud and obscurity of the mission field, or the streets of the ghetto, or even the true spiritual sweetness of just being a nobody whom the Lord uses mightily in small "everyday" ways.

Ah, yes. That last one. That is where I have settled this issue, mostly. I have become (remained) fundamentally a nobody, and honestly, I rather like it here. I don't know yet if the Lord will use me mightily in everyday ways, and I think that I cannot really know, that all I can do is be faithful in my nobodiness, faithful to keep delving deep into the Scriptures, faithful to call on him ceaselessly in worship and intercession, faithful to serve in whatever ways I can offer my small skills and talents, and just let him take care of the mightiness thing, the results. It's not my business. I can go to work, drive the church van, count the offering, raise raspberries and blueberries and chickens, change diapers and read to my grandchildren, do the dishes (gotta do that more!), clear the driveway of snow, clean the chicken coop, and any of a million other tiny, unnoticeable, unheralded, relatively unimportant things, and be content in it, leaving the outcome to the Lord himself. There is "true spiritual sweetness" there, I have discovered.

But...

This morning I was reading in the early chapters of I Kings, and I came to that place where Solomon, having recently become king, gets a visit from God in a dream and is asked the one question most of humanity would positively drool over (I Kings 3:5). The sovereign God, the creator of all things, approaches Solomon in a way akin to the genie approaching Alladin and says, "Ask what you wish me to give you."

It is, perhaps, more a test than an open invitation, and Solomon passed with flying colors. "I really don't need anything," he says to the Lord. "Just this: I'm too young and inexperienced for this job, so I need wisdom to rule and to judge this people."

Clearly, Solomon aced it, and God gave to him wisdom never before seen in a man - along with the untold wealth and power we might have expected him to desire and to ask for.

But what if the Lord came to me in a dream, and asked me that same question? (It could be argued that in Christ he does just that - every day - but that's a topic for some other time.) How would I respond?

For me, at this point in my life, it would be simple. It is the thing that I DO ask, pretty much every day, in various words and forms: that my children and their spouses and my grandchildren would be positively gripped by the love of Christ, and made to burn with passion for his glory such that their lives would be altered forever by that passion, and that their lives might one day warrant a description similar to that written of Keith Green.

That would be very cool.

But I don't want to go back, myself. I'm OK with where God has taken me thus far.