by Dan Haseltine
Jars of Clay
Blood Water Mission

I have no sense of exactly when I first became aware that deep within my soul, or more precise, deep within my gut, an ache and a restlessness, a physical response to things not right in the world, had grown.I had a revelation that once I was just an innocent bystander but I had been chosen to become owner or steward of pain and suffering that I only just observed in the lives of other people.

Not to fix it, but to feel it. I had brushed up against my share of injustices and I still carry the wounds of broken relationships, and cutting betrayal, but this was something bigger. I had grown up in a Catholic church. I remember how it looked, stone and cold, I remember the dark wood confessional booth. I received my first communion and my first confession in that place. Mostly, I remember that God was very big, and concerned about the world. God had big thoughts and big ideas, so big that the ideas of the Catholic Jesus could not fit in the quaint multi-purpose rooms of the baptist church. They could nearly fit into the Cathedrals I read about in books. This is where faith entered my vocabulary.

My journey took me through the Catholic church, the Lutheran church, the Episcopal church, and now into the Presbyterian church. I have visited with many different descriptions of God, and I suppose the only filter I used to decide whether the God of the particular church was the real God, was that that particular God's ideas had to be bigger than the buildings where those ideas were spoken and much bigger than the people who spoke them. I never felt comfortable in a setting where people were too concerned about serving their own needs. I was not much of a fan of the churches filled with needy people who spent Sunday mornings in the prayer rooms grasping for affirmation, happiness, or victory over some sin. Not that God did not care about their needs, but I just didn't see how the prayers of those needy people were any different than the prayers of a child wanting a new toy, or wanting snow so that they did not have to go to school. They were selfish prayers, at least that is what I believed when I was a kid. They were prayers that seemed to ignore the greater kingdom, prayers that were only relevant to people who owned more than one television set, whose cares seemed mostly to deal with middle class struggles. I wanted there to be more.

I loved music. When I was twelve years old I remember watching Friday the 13th part two. I was scared out of my head until my older brother turned the volume off. The images became flat and emotionless. Music always had the power to move me. And when Live AID and Farm AID stepped into my livingroom, I made the connection that music was a big idea, something bigger than the people making it. The people making it at that point of my life were Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel, and U2. And they knew that music was bigger than they were, and so they tried to harness some of that energy to bring people together, and bring people out of the darkness and fear of a post-communism era. They, like Live8 did this past year, took the explosive climate of impending doom and turned peoples hearts and distracted eyes toward a greater and more tangible suffering. Music was the only thing that could face such a massive problem like famine. It takes big ideas, bigger than the people who think them up, to dwarf such massive giants, like global hunger, war, poverty, disease.

For the last 25 years of my life I have watched more giants inhabit the earth. Famine, HIV/AIDS, War, Environmental Crisis have stepped forcefully across the globe. On the other side, God, Music, and Justice. They are the giants that provide shade over my head, and the ones that seem to fill my soul, my heart, my bones with passion, and purpose.

My vocation is one that requires me to face giants every day. I believe God weaves the lust for what is right and true into our being. I would not limit it to some moral code, It is bigger. It is deeper, and it is far less predictable and safe as a list of commandments. It is primitive and organic. It is hormones, and
chemicals, and knowledge, and weight. I look at the world and I describe it. I describe what I see, I respond to big ideas, and I provoke response from my audience. My descriptions are informed not simply by what I see, but what I have seen, what I have tasted, and smelled, and where I remember land mines to be, and where my skin is thicker than it should be, or softer than it should be. When I am in the full stride of my work, I find it impossible to dissect vocation from faith. And it is only when faith and vocation become inseparable that culture can be moved, that ideas bigger than music, and famine, and lyric, and protest, and war can walk with greater redemptive force.

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