MAKE IT STOP...PLEASE!!!

When I was in high school (back in the late 18th century) we did this cheesy Broadway musical called Carousel.  It wasn't cheesy when it first came out in 1945, but by 1977 it was 'camembert on parade' at Heritage High School in Littleton, Colorado.  I played Billy Bigelow, the down-on-his-luck anti-hero who kills himself at the end of the musical (really uplifting stuff).  As Billy, I sang such memorable tunes as "My Boy Bill", and "If I Loved You" and who could forget "You're a Queer One, Julie Jordan" (hey, the musical opened in the 40's - it meant something different then).  Then, there was the big Act One song and dance number, an ode to early summertime called "June is Bustin' Out All Over" (to which the potheads in the back row of the chorus added, snickering, "...and so is her sister Mary Lou".


But the big show-stopping tune was a song (later, made more famous by an exhausted, tear-choked, singing Jerry Lewis at the end of each Muscular Dystrophy telethon since 1964) called "You'll Never Walk Alone".  In the song, the character Aunt Nettie sings these famous words:

   When you walk through a storm

   Hold your head up high

   And don't be afraid of the dark

   At the end of the storm is a golden sky

   And the sweet silver song of the lark

Ah-HA!  You go, Aunt Nettie!  Even the darkest cloud has a silver lining.  To which my mother - at her smart-alecky sarcastic best - used to say, "Remember, it's always darkest...before it's totally black".  Unshaken, Aunt Nettie ends with the big finish:

   Walk on through the rain, walk on through the wind

   Though your dreams be tossed and blown

   Walk on, walk, on with hope in your heart

   On you'll never walk alone

   (Big finish now) You'll NE-VER WALK A-LONE!!!!

Then the cheering crowd leaps to it's feet in spontaneous applause, their hearts buoyed by a new hope, they literally stop the show for several minutes...

Then everyone goes back home to their real lives.  And the world is still a mess, and life is still hard, and relationships are complicated and disappointments, challenges and difficulties seem present at every turn, and sometimes we just want TO MAKE THE RIDE STOP! And Aunt Nettie takes her make-up off and goes back to her house in the suburbs to watch the Tonight Show.  Thanks Aunt Nettie. Glad you could help!


When Jesus told His disciples He had to go, they were wrecked.  But he told them, recorded in in John 14:16, "I will ask the Father, and He will give another Comforter who will NEVER leave you - He is the Holy Spirit".  Aunt Nettie's song was great for some goosebumps, but the Holy Spirit has been given by God to fill our hearts with His love (Romans 5:5).

All month we've been talking about UNCERTAIN TIMES and looking at the Nicene Creed.  This Sunday at Crossroads, we're going to talk about the most uncertain time of all in everyone's life - the times that you and I feel very insignificant, very small, very ill-prepared, very ALONE, and not just a little scared.  And we're going to tackle a big question that everyone asks at some point: If God is so CLOSE...why does he SEEM so far away?   You want to be there.