Late last year, there were several things going on in my life that inspired me to write Don’t Cry For Me When I’m Gone. One of my best friends was moving. I been alive long enough to realize how relationships change when friends move away from each other. Relationships change over time anyway, but those changes seem to accelerate when we are no longer around each other on a regular basis. So that was on my mind. I was also reflecting on friends who seemed to continue to grieve for lost loved ones, even when they have been dead for what seemed like long enough for the grieving process to be over. I pictured the long lost loved ones telling their friends, “Don’t cry for me when I’m gone”.
First, want to let you know that I take my Christian faith seriously. I believe that Jesus has made a significant positive difference in my life to the extent that I would want that for anyone and everyone that I know and meet. That being said, I think that there are ways that we Christians share our faith that are completely ineffective. Sometimes we use the language of our faith that is completely alien to the person we are speaking to. Maybe they’ve never been to a church. Maybe they are a member of another faith. Maybe their experience in church is negative and our choice of words reminds them of the things they don’t like about Christianity. Sometimes our approach is more about focusing on how “bad” they are and using scare tactics. There are lots of ways that our approaches make assumptions about these people that doom our efforts to failure even before the first word leaves our mouth.
I have a Christian friend that had an encounter with another Christian and told about it on Facebook. His story made me think about ineffective evangelism. Here is the content of his original post:
Many societies have survived without gas, electricity, literacy and modern technology, but no society has ever existed without stories. Integral to our human ontology is the need for stories. It is often a challenge for us to learn from the abstract but truth comes alive when it is donned in narratives. Stories have a way of putting flesh to didactic lessons when they are acted out in life situations. Further, stories help register life-lessons not only cognitively for us but they create indelible images in our hearts. This is why 77 per cent of the Bible is narratives and Jesus himself is the quintessential storyteller par excellence. God knows we are story-telling creatures. So, something is amiss if our songs of worship are scanty of any narrative elements. In a genre where we have relatively few story songs, Art Wheeler’s “Six Minutes After Seven” feeds a lacuna. Wheeler joins the lofty heights of Christian story-telling artists such Michael Card, Carman and David Phelps in reviving great story songs. Nevertheless, for those of us who are not familiar with Wheeler, a word of introduction is in order. Hailing from Jackson, Tennessee, Wheeler has been involved in music all of his life. Perhaps what is most impressive about Wheeler is that he not only writes his own music from bar one but he plays all the instruments on record. However, for the major portion of his life he had been writing novelty songs many comic in nature. It’s only after 1998 after the birth of his third child, Wheeler decided to write more his faith and Bible-based songs.
Christmas Eve is the time of the year when the Christmas story is the most real to me. I remember as a child riding home from my grandparents’ Christmas Eve celebration and looking up at the sky searching for Santa’s sleigh. They lived in the country away from the lights of our town and the stars would show up really well. With all of the stars so bright, it made me wonder how bright a star would need to be for the wise men to notice it as special. I thought of the images on the Christmas cards showing the wise men following a gigantic star that you couldn’t help but notice.
I remember as a kid, we would occasionally get Christmas cards that had the phrase “Happy Holidays” or “Seasons Greetings” on the front. We would receive these cards from family members that I knew were good Christian women. I never thought of these phrases as potentially offensive to Christians. But it seems like we have gotten to a point in our world where people want to be offended by any type of greeting. If you say either of these phrases above, you are seen as trying to be politically correct to try and not offend non-Christians. If you insist on saying “Merry Christmas”, you are trying to be politically correct and not offend Christians. It seems that the argument is more about politics than it is about religion. And there shouldn’t be an argument at all.
When I decided to do a promotional video for Electric Jesus, I wanted to wait until the Christmas season to get footage of yards decorated with blow molded nativity scenes. I also decided I might like to purchase my own Electric Jesus to feature in the video. Jackson, Tennessee has a lot of shopping options so I thought would be able to easily find a nativity scene. This wasn’t as easy as I thought. Many retailers don’t carry any of these items anymore because I guess they don’t sell as many. I saw some on-line but I didn’t want to wait for them to ship. I decided to make a road trip to Memphis with my family to see what we could find there. We found a store there that had cartons and cartons of Electric Jesus. They didn’t have as many of the other pieces of the nativity scene. We took video of this shopping trip that we used for the early part of the video.
It was the Christmas season and I was driving through in my neighborhood with some of my kids on the way to church. I saw an old blow molded nativity scene in one of the yards and the phrase came to me: “Shine on Electric Jesus! Shine on!” This was the start of writing this song.
I decided to do a slow reveal for the first verse of the song. The first line set the tone for the song. “Your head and your body are made out of plastic”. When I perform this live for people that have never heard it before, I tell them that I’m going to sing a Christmas song. This first line doesn’t sound anything like what you would expect from the typical Christmas song. It’s not “dashing through the snow” or “sleigh bells ring, are you listening”. The word plastic is abrupt, almost industrial and isn’t going to rhyme with anything fun. The verse is written as a puzzle to get the listener to try and figure out what I’m singing about. I describe properties of the Electric Jesus that you usually don’t think about. You might be able to figure it out by the time I’m talking about using it to decorate the lawn. The final reveal is the chorus.
My mother cooked all moisture and most nutrients out of all of the food she ever cooked. Growing up, I was a skinny teenager probably due to some vitamin deficiency caused by their lack of presence in our meals. I was never concerned about any diseases from undercooked food. That would never happen. There was always massive amounts of food at any meal but you could rest assured that it was always well done.
She enjoyed sausage for breakfast on many mornings. The way she cooked them, they would have also served well as miniature hockey pucks. I always enjoyed fried okra but was surprised when I ate it for the first time anywhere other than at home. Mom’s fried okra was always cooked to the extreme where the corn meal breading was barely held on the pieces of okra that had were black or at least a dark green color.
I spend a lot of time working with the music ministry of the church that I attend. I sing in the choir, play bass in the praise band and sing many of my religious songs during our services. I occasionally fill in leading singing or playing the piano. I also get called on for the occasional special music during the worship service. A few years ago we had a pastor who was greatly involved in an organization from various denominations that conducted prayer services at different churches throughout our city. Our pastor had offered to host one of these services at our church and asked people involved in our music ministry to assist in providing music. The service was held on a weekday in the early afternoon. I was able to adjust my work schedule to attend.
The Halloween party for my fraternity was approaching during my freshman year of college. One of my best friends and I decided that we would go to the party dressed as a couple of the members of the administrative staff of the school. We selected this couple because of their distinct appearance. He was going to go as a rather large member of the administration and I planned to go as the man’s wife. At the time, she served as the Dean of Students. The lady had a fashion sense that appeared to be more appropriate for the 1950’s rather than the early 1980’s. He had a hard time coming up with a costume that captured the essence of the man and he backed out of the plan. I stuck with the original idea and recruited a couple of people to help me put together a costume that would be as authentic as possible.
