ain't got time to die

I just dug up this Facebook post from 2014 because this morning I learned that "the rocks are gonna cry out" is not some old-testament thing, as I always blithely assumed, but rather comes from the Palm Sunday story (was it even Sunday? in any case, that thing we're about to celebrate at church with Jesus and the donkey and the palm branches), Luke 19:40.

Every time I hear this song I am amazed all over again at the power behind it and struck all over again by the tragedy of Matthew's death. We have so much work to do.

Anyway here's the post - from June 14, 2014 (Matthew died a year earlier, on May 13, 2013)

So last year, an ex-boyfriend died. Committed suicide. Jumped off a bridge. I don’t know much about what happened. He was depressed. He’d broken up with his girlfriend. We hadn’t spoken, well, since we broke up twenty years ago, except for a brief exchange of messages on Facebook a while ago. He was a unique soul…yeah we all are, I suppose, but the light he brought to the world was really different. Truly irreplaceable. Way back when we were in high school, he sang this song with his school choir. “I keep so busy praisin’ my Jesus / I ain’t got time to die.” (here it is, if you have a few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7DUFXzIaeI) I remembered it all these years, sang it to my kids. And I thought a lot about it when I heard he’d died. Apparently, he’d found the time. And actually those lyrics, taken literally, make no sense. You can’t be too busy to die. But I think the song is about something else, about fighting against soul-death by doing something meaningful to you. And for all the ridiculously many gifts I’ve been given in my own life, many days I feel I’ve made nothing of them. Mostly because I over-think positively everything. Per Hamlet “the native hue of resolution / is sicklied o’er with pale cast of thought.” (He was talking about suicide. But with me it basically starts with what to have for breakfast in the morning and goes downhill from there.) So I resolved, in my friend’s honor, to stop being so indecisive, so shy, so hesitant. To speak up when I have something to say. To be braver. Even just a little. “If I don’t praise Him / the rocks are gonna cry out!” says the song. So Matthew can’t praise Him anymore, here is me, the rocks, crying out. It’s been a year now and I can’t say I’ve made great strides. But here’s what I did – I sort of took the whole thing too literally and joined my local gospel choir. Did you know gospel choirs were a thing in Europe? Because I didn’t. White people with marginal rhythm and questionable pronunciation praising God in song. In English. Totally. a. thing. I was so, so scared at first. I can’t actually read music. My German is basically terrible. I went home from more than one rehearsal in tears of embarrassment. But I stuck with it. And past the rather significant cultural barriers (the main one being that properly addressing people is VERY IMPORTANT here and I can’t remember anyone’s name to save my life), it turns out these are my people. They wear comfortable shoes and sing cheesy songs about Jesus just for the fun of it. And say what you will about cheesy Jesus songs, they are far better than the normal depressed crap that plays on repeat in my head. Anyway in December, the director asked me if I had any suggestions for our next round of songs, and I told her, figuring it would go nowhere, that I’d like to sing “Ain’t Got Time to Die.” So, yep. Tomorrow at our concert, 50 or so white Swiss (and other) people are singing Ain’t Got Time to Die. This is for you, Matthew. I sincerely hope you’d find it funny, in a good way. 

That was five years ago. That little step was followed by more little steps and now here I am, in some ways in the very same place and in some ways a lot farther down the road...to where? I still don't know.