I just got official word that over 1700 kids have been sponsored at my concerts and speaking gigs over the last 12 months! That’s in HUGE part because of you.
So many of you have come out to shows and church services and college chapels, volunteered at the Compassion table, promoted these events, booked me or told friends or pastors or chaplains to do so. There’s no way I’d be in 100 cities every year without you guys and there’s no way anyone would come out to see me if you weren’t getting the word out and vouching for me. Thank you for all you’ve done to release 1700 kids from poverty in Jesus’ name over the last year!
My big mouth and yours make a pretty good team. Thanks.
A couple days ago we handed our three kids off to grandparents in a Cracker Barrel parking lot halfway between our house and theirs. Then we made the long drive back to Nashville alone.
It’s been eight years since Becky and I became “Mom and Dad.” Eight years of toys on the floor, Dora on the television, VeggieTales in the CD player, and goldfish crackers and nugget shrapnel smashed in to the van’s carpeting. Eight years of being woken up with “I have a growing pain” or “I’m thirsty” or “There’s something in my closet.” Eight years of “You’re interrupting - What do you need to say?” Eight years of hurried eating, dashing to get done before the wiggles kick in. Eight year of early rising. Eight years of planning my sentences and life around three little people’s needs.
We were looking forward to the break. Not from the kids themselves. We love our kids. We even like them. We were - I was - looking forward to doing whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want it done. How great will it be, I thought, to eat what I want, as leisurely as I want, without asking anyone to eat two more bites. How great will it be, I thought, to never be interrupted, to always finish a thought. And how great will it be, I thought, to use the bathroom without anyone knocking on the door and asking me important questions on the whereabouts of a sandal, permission to eat a popsicle or whether I’m going number one or number two.
How great.
How boring, it turns out.
Don’t get me wrong - I thoroughly enjoyed eating at a restaurant last night that my kids would hate. I’ve loved listening to my playlist in the van, never being interrupted, and going number one or number two without telling anyone else which it was. It’s been everything I dreamed it would it.
But it’s also been quiet. Too quiet. And maybe, in time, if I knew my kids weren’t coming back, I’d get used to the lack of sounds, the clean floors, the freedom. But right now, only two days in, I’m a little uncomfortable with it all - like I’ve been dropped into someone else’s life: My mom and dad’s maybe.
I think Becky’s feeling the same way. But she doesn’t write about the uneasy moments of life. She paints stuff.
Yesterday, we painted a room. Today, we’ll paint another. She’s cleaning out the garage right now. Painting trim and replacing light plates later. There’s furniture to be rearranged. Stuff to be put together. Lots to clean. We all cope in our own way. I prefer bacon or Ben and Jerry’s or words.
For those of you with grown kids who’ve now moved out, how long did it take to get a new routine? Do you ever get used to the quiet? What’d you do to make that transition? I’ll be sure to come back and read your comments when my kids are grown and gone for good - sometime in my late fifties.
Scotland has given a lot to the world. The Baycity Rollers, Sean Connery, Braveheart and Adam Smith.
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, during the Age of Enlightenment, Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations. It’s earned him the title “father of economics” and it greatly influenced the founders of America with its argument that free market capitalism was the best economic system available for a society prone to selfishness.
Adam Smith wasn’t just an economist. In fact, at the time, economics wasn’t its own field yet. The best I can figure it was a branch of philosophy mixed with sociology and even a little religion. Adam Smith, for instance, was a professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow - not some mathematician or finance guru working as a prof in a business school. That doesn’t discredit him, of course, but it’s something to keep in mind when reading his thoughts: They’re as much a prescription for morality or theology as they are for business practices.
Adam Smith believed, for instance, that in order for a free market society to prosper, individuals must look out for their own self interests foremost. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
The butcher, for instance, wants to stay in business so he can feed his own family, so he works hard, deals fairly, charges a competitive price so that his business and his family will prosper. Doing business this way is best for the customer also, Smith argued, and for the whole of society. It produces the best product at the best price.
Those to the right in American politics sometimes argue for a unregulated less-regulated free-er free market system than the one we currently have, making arguments that have grown out of Adam Smith’s philosophy. But Adam Smith’s examples come from an imaginary world in which butchers have hearts uncorrupted by the Fall. Real people - real butchers - have a dual nature: one half wanting to behave as Christ and the other wanting to have the power, wealth and position of Christ and to do whatever is necessary to obtain it.
If a butcher were to actually look out for his own self interests first, he could do that by paying an unjust wage to his workers, lying about the quality and origins of his products, making promises for immediate gain with no intention to keep them, etc. There is no free market because no one participating in the market is spiritually free.
Adam Smith, like I said earlier, came up with his ideas during the Age of Enlightenment - a period characterized in part by radical optimism about the human spirit, denying that all men are born spiritually powerless and corrupt. Ronald Reagan sounded a lot like a modern day Adam Smith sometimes. He was very inspiring but very wrong when speaking about the inherent goodness and strength of mankind: “A people free to choose will always choose peace” or “I know in my heart that man is good” or “There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect. ”
No, sir. A people free to choose will be torn between peace and selfish ambition at all costs. The heart of man is not good but impoverished, wicked, arrogant, untrustworthy. His heart is a barrier to justice and equality.
Rush Limbaugh, in a very Reaganesque way, often contrasts “liberals” with “conservatives” by saying that liberals believe the worst about people and conservatives believe the best. If that were true, neither side would be thinking very biblically. Truth is, every Christian is a mixture of the best of God and the worst of himself.
Adam Smith was wrong. Free market capitalism might just be the best economic system the world has ever seen. I assume so, but what do I know about economics? I’m a musician. But it doesn’t produce the rosy results Smith argued it would either. A society full of Smith’s imaginary butchers will not benefit the whole of society because the butcher is not inherently good and self-regulating. He does not naturally pay a living wage to his workers. He does not naturally keep his promises. He does not naturally tell the truth at all times. He’s just like me. And just like you. If we serve ourselves with no outside restraints placed upon us, we’ll cheat to get more and horde what what we get while the distance between us and the have nots widens.
Folks on the left might think they can use this reality as an argument for increased government regulation. But the regulator is human as well, just as corruptible. He also has a history of cheating to get more (power, money, fame, influence) and hoarding what he gets or using it to do more harm.
Or maybe those on the left could use the sinful nature of the butcher to argue for more government spending and services for the have-nots allegedly left in his wake. But those who are served by government programs have the same heart as the butcher and are just as likely to squander and abuse help as the butcher is his wealth. And then there are those who aren’t in need of help who will cheat and lie a corruptible system to get it anyway. How may of us have known someone able to work who has taken advantage of the social services system, decided not to work and lived off of programs funded by the butcher’s taxes.
If Smith, Reagan and Limbaugh are all wrong, then so are Roosevelt, Obama, and Wallis. This error bites all sides of the isle. Doesn’t it?
Adam Smith’s error may come from his understanding of God. Adam Smith is believed to have been a deist - someone who thinks “The Great Architect” built the universe but then walked away from it, never to return, never getting mixed up in human affairs, never entering the human heart, never putting on skin and becoming a man for man’s sake, never sending Spirit to guide and teach, never to lead his People to be creators of equality and justice and, well, regulation.
But we’re not deists. Are we?
I was a saxophone player once. My dad dropped me off at school an hour before the first bell every morning so I could practice. I ate quickly and spent the rest of the lunch period in the band hall making music. When school let out I stayed after and played for another hour or so.
Then one day I sat down at a piano and picked out the main riff from “Push It” by Salt and Pepa on the piano. Then “Peter Gunn”. Eventually, “You’re Not Alone” by Chicago. Girls liked that one. I got serious about the piano.
“You’re such a good sax player,” my mom said. “I wish you wouldn’t change to piano.”
In high school I stuck with the saxophone but saved up my money to buy a keyboard. I started writing music. Then words. Then, just after graduation, my sister-in-law Kathy got a guitar. I picked it up one day, fiddled with it a little and soon I bought my own. “You’re such a good piano player,” mom said. “I wish you wouldn’t change to guitar.”
I studied music composition in college, making treks to Nashville between semesters to learn about the music business and find a job - any job - in it. And I did. After graduation I started an internship with a music publishing company, which led to an actual paying job, which led - in a roundabout way - to a record deal. For the last nine years I’ve been a piano and guitar playing singer-songwriter.
But, as mom knows by now, things change.
I signed a book deal last year - or was it the year before that? - and just never wrote the book. Why is a long boring pathetic and very personal story. But the publisher still wants me to write and I feel more and more compelled and encouraged to do so. Also, Compassion international hired me last year to start a new blogging venture with them and from time to time there’s talk of me being more involved with their ministry in some way. Also, for a while now I’ve thought about going to school. And I get more and more opportunities to speak, which is great since there’s no luggage or cables, background singers, dancers, pyrotechnics or leather pants involved with that sort of thing.
Last week I told my mom and dad all this, that there’s a possibility, at least, that I won’t be a singer guy forever. And mom said, “I wish you wouldn’t change...”
A few days before that conversation I had an important one with Gresham. I was putting something away in the attic when I spotted a souvenir from one of my past lives. I pulled down the case, unsnapped it and pulled out my saxophone, the smell of abandoned brass taking me back to the pawn shop where I first played it and to the band hall where I learned to play it well. I ran my fingers over the pearl keys and clacked them up and down, inspecting the old girl for symptoms of neglect.
“Is that a trumpet?” Gresham asked.
The neck piece slid into the body. The mouthpiece slid onto the neck. And I played.
I played “Blessed Assurance” while Gresham plugged his ears with thumbs. A few jazz licks sleeping the years away in my fingers somewhere came out with surprising ease. Chromatic scale. Pentatonic scale. Major. Minor. Our old high school fight song. A sonata from college.
The whole thing reminded me of a line I heard once: We don’t change. We just become more clearly ourselves.
“I like the guitar better,” Gresham said as I snapped the case up and slid it back between the Christmas tree and a card table and closed the attic door.
Me too.
