Don't You Want to Thank Someone

I heard this song for the first time about a week ago at Andrew Peterson's Light for the Lost Boy release concert, and it's been in my mind ever since - not in the "stuck in my head" sense so much as the "stuck in my soul" sense. I've been washing it through my mind's ear over and over again...

I can't find anywhere online where you can hear the whole thing, but seriously, just go buy the album, this is the culmination of ten songs' worth of meditation on the Fall and Redemption - and the beauty of the Kingdom that we see now through a glass dimly.

Don't You Want to Thank Someone

Words and Music by Andrew Peterson / 1/10/2012, The Warren

Romans 8:19

Ephesians 1:13, 14

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” –Gerard Manley Hopkins

Can’t you feel it in your bones

Something isn’t right here

Something that you’ve always known

But you don’t know why

‘Cause every time the sun goes down

We face another night here

Waiting for the world to spin around

Just to survive

But when you see the morning sun

Burning through a silver mist

Don’t you want to thank someone?

Don’t you want to thank someone for this?

Have you ever wondered why

In spite of all that’s wrong here

There’s still so much that goes so right

And beauty abounds?

‘Cause sometimes when you walk outside

The air is full of song here

The thunder rolls and the baby sighs

And the rain comes down

And when you see the spring has come

And it warms you like a mother’s kiss

Don’t you want to thank someone?

Don’t you want to thank someone for this?

I used to be a little boy

As golden as a sunrise

Breaking over Illinois

When the corn was tall

Yeah, but every little boy grows up

And he’s haunted by the heart that died

Longing for the world that was

Before the Fall

Oh, but then forgiveness comes

A grace that I cannot resist

And I just want to thank someone

I just want to thank someone for this

Now I can see the world is charged

It’s glimmering with promises

Written in a script of stars

Dripping from prophets’ lips

But still, my thirst is never slaked

I am hounded by a restlessness

Eaten by this endless ache

But still I will give thanks for this

‘Cause I can see it in the seas of wheat

I can feel it when the horses run

It’s howling in the snowy peaks

It’s blazing in the midnight sun

Just behind a veil of wind

A million angels waiting in the wings

A swirling storm of cherubim

Making ready for the Reckoning

Oh, how long, how long?

Oh, sing on, sing on

And when the world is new again

And the children of the King

Are ancient in their youth again

Maybe it’s a better thing

A better thing

To be more than merely innocent

But to be broken then redeemed by love

Maybe this old world is bent

But it’s waking up

And I’m waking up

‘Cause I can hear the voice of one

He’s crying in the wilderness

“Make ready for the Kingdom Come”

Don’t you want to thank someone for this?

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Come back soon

Come back soon

©2012 Jakedog Music (adm by Music Services) (ASCAP) 

“There Will be Butterflies.”

I came across the line on the airplane. I had decided only days before the conference to read the book, and here I was, on my way, with half of it left to go. Ah, well, I’d thought. If I don’t finish, I don’t finish. No one will be upset with me.

But then I started reading, and words and phrases jumped off the page at me, rattling my notions of how the world works and reminding me that the God I serve is just as micro as He is macro. That the world of molecules and the world of galaxies are magical places, painted by a Great Artist. That the Great Artist loves and cares for and comforts His people.

And I sat on the airplane, devouring the book, almost grateful for the flight delay as it would give me more time on the tilt-a-whirl.

Then I came to the line. I’m not a margin writer. I don’t generally underline. I avoid dog-earing page corners. I like clean pages and post-it notes. But I have journals full of lines from books, the ones that strike me just right that I can’t set aside, that I must keep and find again. So when I came to the line my first instinct was to dig in my backpack for my journal. And then I reached for a pen…and came up empty-handed.

I had grabbed the essentials – wallet, chapstick, Asian coffee-flavored hard candies – from my purse when I put it into the bag being gate-checked. Somehow I had missed a pen.

I was frozen for a moment, torn over the need to mark the passage and my distaste for marring pages. I glanced out of the corner of my eye at the man next to me. His burly arms were painted with colorful tattoos, his goatee long and frizzled. He read a graphic novel. It was the graphic novel that made me hope. Tattoos and a grizzly goatee might be on a biker guy, and I’d be less likely to expect him to carry a pen. But the graphic novel made me feel a little kinship with the man – though I can’t say I’ve ever read one. I know people who read graphic novels, and I know that they have creative minds and hearts. He might have a pen.

“Excuse me,” I asked, still slightly intimidated by the gauges in the ears and the hipster glasses on his round face. “Do you have a pen I could borrow?”

The pen was a sea-green Bic with sparkles in the plastic. He was not a cap-chewer. He went back to his graphic novel and I dove back in, to the line, and began writing on the first page of my new journal.

“To His eyes, you never leave the stage. You don’t cease to exist. It is a chapter ending, an act, not the play itself. Look to Him. Walk toward Him. The cocoon is a death, but not a final death. The coffin can be a tragedy, but not for long.

“There will be butterflies.”ⁱ

In an instant I was back in a hospital intensive care unit on December second, knowing that the man in the bed would not recover, would never play piano for me again. I was sitting in my sister’s bedroom on April ninth hearing on the phone that a woman I loved and worked with daily had died the evening before, three weeks after the cancer diagnosis. I was at the memorial service on May fifth, thinking of the man who had been my teacher, and watching his wife and children and grandchildren mourn him.

And I thought of what Lisa said when she woke up on that Easter morning that she died. Her sister came into the room and greeted her with, “He is risen.”

Lisa sat up in the bed and said, “He is risen indeed.” Then she gathered her energy enough to speak again. “It’s Resurrection Day, and my boots are in the closet.”

“There will be butterflies.”

And I thought of losing Keren, and losing Aimee, and all the other coffins that have been tragedies. But not for long.

“There will be butterflies.”

If nothing else this weekend at Hutchmoot reminded me of that hope. I serve the Creator God who chose to enter the anthill, the Second Adam who chose to lay down his life fighting the dragon in order to save His bride.ⁱⁱ Whose people create works that point to Him in various ways, like setting a story in a house called Maison Dieu, which is haunted by a Spirit, which welcomes all travelers to the central Chapel where they are reborn.ⁱⁱⁱ Whose greatest stories plant a signpost at the end that says, “The story goes on that way.”^iv

“Death feels so wrong to us because death ends a story that was meant to go on.”^v

But this life and these deaths are the foundation for a new work, a new creation, built on the old…

“Our hope is not for a happy ending, but for a happy beginning—a new story.”^vi

“There will be butterflies.”

---

ⁱ Wilson, N.D., Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl. Thomas Nelson. p. 113

ⁱⁱ Wilson, N.D., Ideas presented in session on Adventurous Storytelling and in Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl.

ⁱⁱⁱ Goudge, Elizabeth, Pilgrim’s Inn. From Sarah Clarkson’s session on Spiritual Subtext.

^iv Peterson, A.S., Idea presented in session on Tales of the New Creation.

^v Peterson, A.S., Tales of the New Creation.

^vi Trafton, Jennifer. Tales of the New Creation.

Fare Forward, Voyagers

On the Sunday morning of Hutchmoot, my sister and I went to church with the friends we were staying with at Christ Presbyterian Church of Nashville. The minister, Scott Sauls, spoke from Philippians 2 on "The Humility of God." In one of those "God-things" everything he said seemed to fit hand in glove with the content of the conference.

He challenged the congregation to look to Christ's humility as an example and to be imitators of him. He said that humility is the freedom from the need to be thinking of ourselves, that humility liberates us to look toward others. He pointed to Jonathan, the prince of Israel, as an example - Jonathan weakened his own position so that David might become strong. And then he pointed out the irony: the less Jonathan acted like a king, the more kingly he became in character.

We serve a God who likes juxtapositions like that. He requires death for life, losing our lives for finding them. If nothing else this weekend was a reminder of the great juxtaposition that is the Suffering Servant and the Reigning King.

I could tell you the ideas I was presented with this weekend which took my brain out of my head, scrubbed it up and down on a washing board, and stuffed it back in, all freshly laundered and stretched in unfamiliar places. I could tell you about the delightful people I met who were kind, thoughtless of self, and thoughtful of others. I could tell you about the princes and princesses I met who made themselves nothing and thereby became great. 

But I seem to be unable to form into typewritten words what I really want to say about this conference. So, instead, I shall lean upon one of my favorite poets, T.S. Eliot, in his master work of juxtaposition, The Four Quartets.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
-"East Coker" V.123-133

I can't quite find a way to explain it, but that passage sums up the feelings from this past weekend - the joy, the agony, the stillness, the running, the hoping, the waiting, the loving, the faith...

We've all gone our separate ways now, and cries of, "Hutchmoot let down!" are filling my news feed on Facebook. I'm certain we shall soon become wrapped up into the worlds we find ourselves in, but I hope that our hugs at the church or at the airport are not fully goodbyes. Instead, I hope that they are not goodbyes at all. But rather moments when, instead of thinking of ourselves, we were free to look toward others, to give them our kingly robes, and to send them out renewed.

"Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers." 
-"The Dry Salvages" III.69-70