"God Sent You" (B. Springsteen): A Meditation

 “Lost on the road.” Have you been there? That’s a rhetorical question. Of course, who hasn’t felt lost on the road, lost along the journey, lost and nowhere to go? 

Somewhere between the mountains reaching high, where a soul is closer to God, and the sea sinking low, where a soul is far from God, somewhere in the valleys of life feeling lost, a soul prays in the morning.

“I prayed for you this morning.”

There’s a couple ways to interpret this, right? I can pray for you in general like I do every day, pray for your well-being. Here, I’m praying for your sake. 

But another way to pray for someone is to pray for someone to come to you. Here, prayer is a sort of beckoning. I need you to be here and so I pray that God sends you to me to help. This prayer for help is for my sake, for you to help me. 

It’s not clear which way the narrator prays for this someone.

Maybe it’s a little of both. He prays for the person that he or she will be well. And at the same time, in praying for him or her, he realizes he needs that person with him. He needs his or her friendship and care and prays that person will show up to help him somehow.

Dare I say it, this is a good recipe for our prayer life. Yes, we ought to pray for others, for their well-being. But it’s important to pray for ourselves, for our own well-being, and for others’ help in this regard! We all need others! We can’t make it alone. We need the power of friendship and togetherness! It’s okay to pray for others’ help. Especially these days!

These days when darkness lingers long! These days the wine in our glass is quickly turning to dust and ashes. Despair and death hover all around us. Anxiety and hopelessness loiters and leaves us grasping for some semblance of lasting humanity.

I don’t know about you, but I pray that Christ would again be sent our way. Maybe that’s the “you” in the song? Maybe it’s a prayer for Christ to be sent the narrator’s way. 

Lord knows, we need Christ with us! We need his safety and salvation! Faith is so hard to see and keep some days. 

Christ, kumbaya, which means “come by here”! Come by here, Lord, increase our faith. Come by here, Lord, help our unbelief! 

Maybe the biggest temptation these days? Losing hope, losing faith, and something else – losing perspective. 

We can’t lose perspective. Troubling and terrifying times have found us before and we’re still here. This is true personally and collectively. 

I often try to put myself in the shoes of an elderly Black person in America. Our Black elderly brothers and sisters, their ancestors going with them, have dealt with capture and enslavement, the terror that ended Restoration, Jim Crow and lynchings, bombings, murders, and assassinations during the Civil Rights Movement, reminders of all of this with George Floyd. Talk to an elderly Black person, and they’ll tell you how the current turmoil doesn’t feel so new or unique. 

Yet, folks get by. Yet, folks keep believing. Yet, folks keep hoping. Yet, folks keep on keeping on! Why? Because God is good, and God is with us and will get us through!

There’s an inner light to help us. 

This inner light, what is it? The term itself is a Quaker term. Sometimes its referred to as inward light. It is the light of Christ shining inward and into us. Christ’s inward light is reflected in us! Whether we acknowledge it or not, Christ’s light glows bright in us. 

When we acknowledge it, when we acknowledge the light of Christ in us, we let it shine. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” In naming this little light of ours, the inner light we have, in seeing it shining in us, we let it shine. Acknowledging the light in us and letting the light shine from us happens simultaneously. 

Christ’s light comes to us in mysterious ways. Sometimes Christ’s light comes directly to us, in the spiritual peace found in prayer and meditation, in a road to Damascus experience, in opening our eyes to the truth of Christ. But sometimes it comes in the guise of a friend’s embrace, a love’s holding of your hand, a child’s smile.   

The narrator of the song sees and experiences God in the presence of someone sent to him. 

I lie still in the evening. I listen as God's breath drifts through the trees. And I can feel the darkness receding. God sent you to me.

My wife Holly, God sent her to me. I won’t say too much because I don’t want to be bawling from the pulpit. Where would I be without her? Not here, now, that’s for sure. She’s never accepted less from me than what she sees in me. Sometimes, her faith in me was the only faith I knew. An early nickname for her applies. Takara, Japanese for treasure. Indeed, she was and remains my treasure.

My son Corey. God sent him to me. Again, I won’t say too much for the same reason I gave for his mom. I maybe hide it well, but I have a selfish side. Before Corey, that selfish side was like weeds in the flower garden of my life. With Corey’s first breath, God’s natural weed-remover showered upon me. I’ve sometimes said, Corey saved me. Put more correctly, God, in giving the gift of Corey, saved me from my outsized self. Indeed, God sent him to me.     

The village that helped us raise our son. God sent that village to us. He wouldn’t have gotten to his senior year of high school without the help of a village of teachers and paras, occupational, physical, and talk therapists, doctors and nurses, along with friends and family and church communities. For his graduation, Holly is working on a sash that includes all these caregivers’ names which Corey will carry or wear when he graduates in June. That’s how essential this village of caregivers has been to us. Indeed, God sent them to us.

Lastly, there’s you all, Plainville Congregational. God sent you to me. You, this community, helped us get through so much these past 5 years. I know I’ve been rather emotionally neutral in public as I face this coming transition. I don’t think it’s hit me yet. But please know I love this community and will miss you.

So, to wrap this up, here’s the simple, yet profound message of the song before I play it: Life may be hard and replete with hardships, but we don’t go it alone. We can’t go it alone! In those closest to us or even in those we just met, God has sent help and hope our way. God sends human hearts to help us get through. Don’t ever underestimate or ignore the answered prayer of friends walking alongside you.

I pray that you will keep praying, keep remembering, keep following the guiding light of Christ, that inner light that helps us face and forsake the temptation of despair and hopelessness and overcome.