free to be

Andrew Peterson-one of my favorite musicians of all times! The lyrics to his songs are brimming with truth. I'm enclosing a link to his site (at the very end of this blog) where he keeps his journal entries. The entry I've copied below, incase you'd rather not go to his site, is his most recent and it's worth reading if you have a minute.



Freedom
May 2, 2006
Andrew Peterson



There’s a short list of things I’m sure I’ll never forget.

Things that burned themselves into my mind’s iris, so that even when my mind’s eye is closed, I’ll see them still. I’ll never forget seeing my wife for the first time, lit up with a hot Florida sun in front of my college. I’ll never forget the births of any of my children. I’ll never forget the smell of the hayloft at Grandma Click’s house in South Florida, or the vivid cloud spray over a field of corn near my house in Lake Butler one night when I was riding my little Yamaha scooter at sundown. I had pulled into the field to watch the colors fade, and the farmer who owned it saw me and barreled down a dirt road to where I was straddling the scooter. He asked me what I was doing, and I remember embarrassingly saying that I liked to paint and I was there to watch the sun set. He snorted and told me to look for inspiration elsewhere. Then I realized that the little black key had jarred out of the scooter somewhere along the road and I had no way to crank it up again. As if it weren’t already awkward enough being shooed out of a cornfield on a scooter, I had to push the scooter the few miles home through the country. I remember how sheepish I felt, but I also remember that stark gold and red sunset, and it’s the same one I think of every time I hear the Rich Mullins song The Howling, where it says “In the West I see an evening, a scarlet thread stretched beneath the gathering dark / Red as the blood on the hands of the savior, rich as the mercy that flowed from his broken heart.” That’s the sunset that I see in my mind, and the lyric changed it from being a thing of beauty to being a thing of Truth.

I could write about each of those things that I’ll never forget, and maybe I will, but right now I want to tell you about a woman sitting on the front row of the Maine Correctional Institution’s church service Sunday morning. Andy Gullahorn, Ben and I were invited to play there by a sweet woman named Joy. She’s a seminary student who runs the church services (among other things) at both the men’s and women’s prisons there outside of Portland. We didn’t really know what we were getting into, but it was impossible not to think about Jesus saying, “I was in prison and you visited me.” How could we say no? We loaded up our instruments into Joy’s car, exhausted from the late night/early morning schedule of that weekend, glad that we didn’t have to worry about a sound system. I tell you that when I get the honor of sitting with Ben and Andy to make music without bothersome cables and direct boxes and microphones, it’s something special. I love being able to hear all the nuances those guys put into the songs, and we all play better, because we can really hear each other. Anyway, we walked through several series of iron-barred doors, and every time they clanged shut behind me I was more thankful that I would be allowed to leave that place that afternoon. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be stuck there for years upon years. The men filed in with their handlebar moustaches and their tattoos—and their bibles—and listened to us play for forty five minutes or so. It was exactly like you’d imagine. A sparse room. An unemotional but grateful audience. That common feeling of gratitude in the face of gratitude when you’ve actually managed to do something selfless for once. What I mean is, the men at the prison kept thanking us for coming, but all we could do was thank them for having us. The kingdom nurtures itself on the Spirit of God in the saints who serve. Joy asked us to close with After the Last Tear Falls and we could hear several gruff voices singing along.

We packed up again and did the same thing for the women’s prison. It was very different in the women’s wing. It still felt like prison, but a little more like a high security hospital. Still sterile and cold, but shinier. A prison with a woman’s touch. Joy busied herself with bouncing around the area with my charango, flaunting its strangeness in an effort to get women who wouldn’t ordinarily come to church to listen to us play.

Because the intimidation was less, I looked more directly at the women prisoners than I did the men, though most of them could’ve beat me, Ben and Andy to a pulp if they’d wanted. There was a sweet little round black lady named Peaches who wouldn’t look me in the eye. There was a kind woman named Stacy who was missing most of her teeth. But the woman whose face I’ll never forget sat on the front row very quietly, even delicately. She held her bible in her lap, wearing the same blue prison issue jumpsuit as the rest of these women, but her face bore a kind of innocent sadness that struck me. I realize now that she looked to me like a personification of hope. I can’t explain why. That’s just how it seemed.

One thing Joy warned us about was not asking any of the prisoners what they’d done to get there. That was information that we’d only find out if the inmates volunteered it, and I can’t imagine them wanting to talk about it. It was so hard for me to imagine what these women had done to be sentenced to prison—not just jail, but prison. It’s true that it wasn’t a roomful of June Cleavers, but they weren’t a room full of Cruella De Vils either. It was easier to imagine the men breaking the law than the women.

I couldn’t imagine what this small woman could’ve possibly done to be arrested and sentenced to prison. I sang the Queen of Iowa and told the story of the woman I wrote it for, how she’d gotten AIDS from a rape, and I heard sniffles. I realized then that some of these women probably know what it’s like to be raped. I pray the hope in that song seeped into them. At one point, the woman on the front row who looked like hope said in a soft voice, “After the Last Tear Falls?” It occurs to me now that it’s the same song that spoke the most to the Queen of Iowa. We played the song at the end, and every line to that song hit me in a new way. I risked a glance up at the woman who’d requested it, and I saw a sublime picture.

She sat still as a statue, hugging her bible to her chest. Her head was slightly bowed and she stared at nothing in particular. I saw two perfect teardrops gliding down her wet cheeks and she had the faintest smile on her face. My chest convulsed and I was unable to sing for a few words, so pure was that image. A criminal holding on for dear life to her bible, brimming with regret for whatever she’d done to end up there, comforted down to her very marrow by the hope that Christ really is as powerful and loving and forgiving as He promises to be. And like I said, she was hope, and I found hope in her. It was easy to believe that the human I was singing for was an immortal, bound up in Christ and made for eternity, though her skin and bones were locked behind the bars of that cold, cold place. In Christ, she was light in the darkness. In Christ, she gave hope even as she was desperate for it. She poured it out even as she drank it up. Just like the men in the prison who thanked us while we were thanking them, and the other women who sat and cried and learned to not look away from their suffering but through it and into the eyes of God.

I'll never forget that picture. I'm writing this from the freedom of my living room in Nashville, and she's asleep in her prison cell right now, just as free.


"I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us."


I can’t remember her name.

AP

http://www.andrew-peterson.com/journals.php