down the long road

One of my tasks in preparing to move is to go through my CDs and transfer the bulk of them to my MacBook instead of boxing them all up to head south. I’ve invested a lot of money in CDs over the years, collecting a good bit of interest, though not of the monetary kind. I’ve spent the better part of the day in the D through G section of our collection and have downloaded music from almost one hundred of the silver discs, finding some old friends, bringing up some wonderful memories, and raising some interesting questions. (Who is the Willard Grant Conspiracy and why do I have one of their records?)

Cliff Eberhardt is a singer/songwriter I learned about soon after moving to Boston, thanks to David Wilcox’s covers of a couple of his songs. I hadn’t listened to The Long Road in a long time. The title track is a wonderful duet with Richie Havens (one of the best voices ever) and the lyric says:

There are the ones that you call friends.
There are the ones that you call late at night.
There are the ones who sweep away your past
With one wave of their hand.

There are the ones that you call family.
There are the ones that you hold close to your heart.
They are the ones who see the danger in you
Who won't understand.

I can hear your voice in the wind.
Are you calling to me, down the long road?
Do you really think there's an end?
I have followed my dream
Down the long road.

You are the one that I met long ago.
You are the one who saw my dream.
You are the one, took me from my home
And left me off somewhere.

Somehow I feel you are here
And you are waiting in that dream.
And somewhere down this road we will awake
And be at the start again.

I can hear your voice in the wind.
Are you calling to me, down the long road?
Do you really think there's an end?
I have lived my whole life
Down the long road.

I gotta find you tonight.
Are you waiting for me, down the long road?
Do you really think there's an end?
I have lived my whole life
Down the long road.

Are you waiting for me?
I can hear your voice in the wind.
Are you calling to me, down the long road?
Do you really think there's an end?
I have lived my whole life
Down the long road.

In these days of change, when some things are moving faster than we can keep up with and others not moving at all (anyone want to buy a house at the beach?), the question in the song is haunting:

Do you really think there’s an end?

I think I have lived my whole life down the long road. Now, it stretches out again and turns so quickly and so sharply that we can’t see much more than a few steps ahead. We are going to have to make some important and difficult choices without knowing how the terrain is going as we make the turn.

Ginger did a great job on Sunday shedding fresh light on Peter and John’s encounter with the man at the gate. “We don’t have any money,” they said (I’m with them so far), “but what we have we’ll gladly give. In the name of Jesus, get up and walk.”

What healing work can we do in Jesus’ name, is the way I heard what she was saying.

When I was in seminary and John Claypool was preaching, I heard someone criticize him by saying, “The only people who relate to him are the walking wounded and those trapped in adolescent rebellion.”

Without really thinking, I looked at the guy and said, “Who’s left?”

We have all spent our whole lives on the long road. The most consistent daily act of healing we can do in Jesus’ name is to get up and walk: walk into the middle of our families and friends and work places and schools and wherever else we walk and offer ourselves.

I can hear God calling our names.

Peace,
Milton