Your funeral, your view of eternity; Finding a Dutch bakery; F-bombs and the gospel.
3 Things this week and the poem One Day
Thanks for spending some of your weekend with Things I Wrote Down. Jumping right into it with three things and a poem. Let’s go!
1. Your funeral your view of eternity
Have you planned out the songs at your funeral yet? It may be worth thinking about it in-depth and looking up the lyrics before you plan the song list for your last will and testament.
I ask you about your hopefully far-in-the-future dirges because there's been a lot of shock about the song performed at Jimmy Carter's state funeral this week, almost as much chat as George W Bush's locker room chest tap or the whispered choir boy giggles shared between Trump and Obama.
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Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang a twangy rendition of Imagine the famous song by John Lennon. And the internet blew up about it, with outrage, confusion and criticism. The opening lyric, of course, fuelled the controversy:
Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us, only sky
As a professed lyric agnostic (I never pick up lyrics and have hilarious anecdotes of what I sing in church or at concerts) until this moment, I didn't realize that the lovely and sentimental Imagine professes a reality devoid of eternity. It imagines humanity in unity, but without the systems of earth… it’s basically the hippie, LSD dream of unity: no attachments or rules or trouble, just love and peace.
Which, of course, is antithetical to the professed beliefs of the evangelical former President. You know, that, like, there’s a God in a heaven and a world lost in sin and a Spirit that unifies us through the sacrifice of his Son to return humanity to God, defeating sin and death and ushering in true unity and peace. What a stark contrast to other state funerals, for, say, The Queen whose funeral declared the gospel from end to end and seized the moment to announce it to the world as a last, holy hurrah.
My hot take is that Carter was misheard when he went over his funeral details and that he said "I Can Only Imagine."
Unlikely, but those are the lyrics I'll choose to mishear.
2. Finding a Dutch bakery
My wife Petra celebrated a milestone birthday this weekend. As part of the celebrations we wanted to honour her Dutch birth with some baked goods. So we did a bakery hunt. It turns out there’s a number of great ones in our area that we didn’t know about.
Our online and in-person sleuthing brought us to little towns in south western Ontario. Mt. Elgin has a few delightful bakeries, as does Tillsonburg, and St. Thomas also brings the Dutch goods alive in their glory.
But we landed at the Strathroy Deli & Dutch Shop to supply our little party. It has, all the dutch meats, candy, snacks, salted licorices, and almond-based baked goods a girl could dream of. If you’re in the area, stop in.
Rumour has it they hold an incredible cheese sale every year that people line up the street for, to save big on rounds of cheese. If you know, you know.
F-bombs and the gospel
I haven't watched it yet, but the 3 hour interview between Joe Rogan, the biggest podcaster in the world, and Wes Huff, the big-bicep Canadian apologist went viral this week.
Huff walked through major tenets of the faith, including detailed histories and responses to Christianity without notes, covering over 2,000 years of history with aplomb. Some are saying it may be the widest audience (190 million listeners) to hear the gospel in a single moment in history. Can someone fact check that?
Mel Gibson, the controversial Catholic and incredible film director, appeared a few days later and shared about his faith (among other topics) as his house burned down in the California fires.
I haven't seen either interview, just clips on X—who times time to sit and listen to these 3 hr shows?!—but this meme did the rounds, and is hilarious.
Some criticized Huff for appearing on a show with a host who drops the f-bomb so gratuitously. And it's potentially jarring, so listener beware. I think it's absolutely wonderful and refreshing. People will hear the rough, real language if they tune into Rogan and podcasters like him every day. But rarely, until now, have audiences heard the gospel shared so openly or intelligently on his platform.
Years ago I had the idea for a series of writings entitled “Well we live in an R-rated world,” and this interview fleshes out the thesis. To me it's inspiring (and essential) to see people stand up authentically and effectively in the market of ideas and remain true to their principles even as others show up authentically as their imperfect selves.
A poem
Here’s a poem that imagines a reality that includes a heaven, where love and peace kiss, and those who wait on either side are reunited. I hereby permit it for usage at state funerals.
Thank you Andrew for the ‘BEAUTIFUL’ poem!