So here’s a taste of what’s on the playlist:

Keb Mo, “Life Is Beautiful”
Brett Dennen, “Blessed”
Louis Armstrong, “What a Wonderful World”
Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, “Over the Rainbow”
Jack Johnson, “Banana Pancakes”
Three Dog Night, “Celebrate”
Jimmy Buffett, “I Love the Now”
Zac Brown Band, “Where the Boat Leaves From”
The Beatles, “Twist and Shout” (makes me think of my granddaughter)
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, “House at Pooh Corner” (makes me think of my boys when young)
The Doobie Brothers, “Listen to the Music”
The Allman Brothers, “Blue Sky”
Ben Harper, “Get It Like You Like It” (associated with coaching little league …)
Coldplay, “Viva La Vida”
Dave Matthews, “Every Day”
Rare Earth, “I Just Want to Celebrate”
Eagles, “Already Gone”
Grand Funk Railroad, “Some Kind of Wonderful”
Steppenwolf, “Magic Carpet Ride” (live)

Ah, well, there are a few pick-me-ups. What other suggestions do you have? What music can lift you?

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On a music theme, have you listened to Marc Cohn’s new recording, “Listening Booth: 1970″? It’s amazing!

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Congrats to Dr. Randy Lowry, who just finished five years as president of David Lipscomb University. He (and Rhonda!) have built an amazing leadership team and faculty. It’s a top-flight school — a wonderful success story!

But I’ve never gotten to go to a concert.

And that streak ends Tuesday night!

More about The Eagles later. But for right now: what’s your all-time fav Eagles’ tune?

I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
But yes I’m still running

You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Of my shame
You know I believe it!

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
When they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one laughs at God
When the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God
When it’s gotten real late
And their kid’s not back from the party yet

No one laughs at God
When their airplane start to uncontrollably shake
No one’s laughing at God
When they see the one they love, hand in hand with someone else
And they hope that they’re mistaken

No one laughs at God
When the cops knock on their door
And they say we got some bad news, sir
No one’s laughing at God
When there’s a famine or fire or flood

*Chorus*
But God can be funny
At a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke, or
Or when the crazies say He hates us
And they get so red in the head you think they’re ‘bout to choke
God can be funny,
When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus
God can be so hilarious
Ha ha
Ha ha

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
When they’ve lost all they’ve got
And they don’t know what for

No one laughs at God on the day they realize
That the last sight they’ll ever see is a pair of hateful eyes
No one’s laughing at God when they’re saying their goodbyes
But God can be funny
At a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke, or
Or when the crazies say He hates us
And they get so red in the head you think they’re ‘bout to choke
God can be funny,
When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus
God can be so hilarious

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one laughing at God in hospital
No one’s laughing at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God when they’re starving or freezing or so very
poor

No one’s laughing at God
No one’s laughing at God
No one’s laughing at God
We’re all laughing with God

Two of my favorites on the playlist are written by Stephen Stills: “For What It’s Worth” and (the best in the list) “Southern Cross.” “My love is an anchor tied to you, tied with a silver chain.” I’m ready to sail for Tahiti! Here’s a 1982 version of CSN singing it. (Originally, Stills was the only one of the group who recorded the song — along with Timothy Schmit, of the Eagles.)

Some of their best stuff, of course, was written by Graham Nash — notably “Teach Your Children” and “Our House.”

My CSNY advisor is my buddy Thom. So, hey, Mr. Editor: break away from work a bit today. A&M Press can survive without you for a moment. Give us the scoop on the group. What are the essential songs — for them as a group and individually — beyond the freshman-level playlist? Who was the real musical genius? And is Neil Young always singing falsetto? Inquiring minds want to know.

And YOU — what’s your favorite song by the group or one of the individual artists?

I can’t tell you how many times through the years people have wanted me to listen to a song: something that meant so much to them that they wanted to share it — or perhaps they thought I couldn’t understand them without hearing it. At times the songs have been “sacred”; at other times “secular.” That’s a very thin distinction, indeed, when you’re talking about something that has moved a person’s heart. The voice of Christ breaks out in many places.

Here are some words that have been on my lips recently, from my dear old buddy Charles Wesley:

Finish then thy new creation,
Pure, unspotted, may we be;
Let us see our whole salvation
Perfectly secured by thee;
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place.
Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love and praise.

But also these (Chris Rice):

Weak and wounded sinner
Lost and left to die
O, raise your head, for love is passing by
Come to Jesus
Come to Jesus
Come to Jesus and live.

I spoke with another friend yesterday about Easter, and somehow this morning — even with allergies trying to pin me to the mat (after the first day of baseball practice) — I can feel the lift of Easter faith.

These simple words are on my heart this morning:

He is Lord, he is Lord!
He is risen from the dead
and he is Lord!
Every knee shall bow,
Every tongue confess
That Jesus Christ is Lord.

Her sudden rise to fame from early jobs with her eighth-grade education (Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken, Wal-Mart, Red Lobster, Houston stripper), her popularity with Playboy, her gold-digging marriage with an octogenarian (she married twice: once to a 16-year-old and once to an 89-year-old), her lawsuit to keep his money after he died, her show making fun of her weight and drinking — all is by now well known.

Why does this story play so well? Are we really drawn to human trainwrecks? In what ways did our values push her toward more and more tragic decisions?

And is it still possible to see the humanity of the woman? Is it possible to see the person whom God pursued relentlessly?

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Just two years ago, it was the Beach Boys that got the car pool guys to open their eyes a bit. But that was sixth grade. They were just boys. Now they’re iPod carrying eighth graders. It’s Jack Johnson. Great music. (A friend just told me about “My Own Two Hands” from the Curious George soundtrack. Very nice duet with Ben Harper.)

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Sunday evening we had our annual lament service — a time to grieve and to remember those we’ve lost. While it was not a big crowd, it was a powerful experience. After hearing scripture and praying, we listened to an ACU freshman play the dulcimer. As he moved into “When Peace Like a River,” you could hear people weeping. Then as we went forward to light candles to remember those we love, a time of prayer and ministry — unplanned! — broke out. I was in the role of minister. But later . . . when everyone had left . . . I had my own few moments in front of the candles with the music playing and the images still rolling to remember.

Now I’m ready. I’m going to try to start working on it during “spare time” (ha!), and then the elders have given me some time this June to finish it.

It’s very important to me, and I’d appreciate your prayers. I’ll tell you more about it later.

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You asked for it. You got it. (The antecedent of “you” is a few readers with a warped sense of humor.) “Mike Cope Sings the Classics” from the ’05 Zoe Conference.

Thanks to Matt Maxwell, my tech guru, for getting this on youtube. He and I filmed the whole thing in about an hour, and then Grant Boone added the impromptu voice-over later.

You’ve heard “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” of course–along with “Come Monday.” Yeah, yeah. Probably even “Fins” and “Volcano.”

But how about “Tin Cup Chalice,” “One Particular Harbor,” “Migration,” “School Boy Heart” and “I Love the Now”? Maybe “Meet Me in Memphis” or Jimmy’s version of “Brown-Eyed Girl,” “Mexico,” or “Southern Cross”?

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One of my best reads last year was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. The novel is a long letter from a 76-year-old minister to his 6-year-old son. John Ames married when he was young, but his wife died in childbirth (along with the daughter she was giving birth to). He remained single–and at the same church–for four decades, when he married a woman thirty years younger.

Near the end of his life, he writes to his son to tell him who he is (was) and to let the boy know about his grandfather and great grandfather, also pastors–one a big war-promoter and the other a pacifist.

There are so many things I love about this novel, but one of the most significant things to me was her insight about sermon preparation, about preaching, and about ministry. How could someone write this who hasn’t been a minister herself?

Here’s a sample:

“Your mother is respectful of my hours up here in the study. She’s proud of my books. She was the one who actually called my attentionn to the number of boxes I have filled with my sermons and my prayers. Say, fifty sermons a year for forty-five years, not counting funerals and so on, of which there have been a great many. Two thousand two hundred and fifty. If they average thirty pages, that’s sixty-seven thousand five hundred pages. Can that be right? I guess it is. I write in a small hand, too, as you know by now. Say three hundred pages make a volume. Then I’ve written two hundred twenty-five books, which puts me up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity. That’s amazing. I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I’ll tell you frankly, that was wonderful.”

And then this:

“I suppose it’s natural to think about those old boxes of sermons upstairs. They are a record of my life, after all, a sort of foretaste of the Last Judgment, really, so how can I not be curious? Here I was a pastor of souls, hundreds and hundreds of them over all those years, and I hope I was speaking to them, not only to myself, as it seems to me sometimes when I look back. I still wake up at night, thinking, That’s what I should have said! or That’s what he meant! remembering conversations I had with people years ago, some of them long gone from the world, past any thought of my putting things right with them. And then I do wonder where my attention was. If that is even the question.”

One more:

“A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. It has to be heard in that way. There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thought–the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider.”

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And speaking of sermons, just a moment for preacher geek. I just finished Paul Scott Wilson’s Preaching and Homiletical Theory. I had already worked through his books God Sense: Reading the Bible for Preaching and The Four Pages of the Sermon, but I enjoyed this one much more. If you haven’t had a chance to catch up on works on homiletics for a while, this will provide a lot of help. The opening section on the Bible (with chapters entitled “Biblical Preaching,” “Exegesis for Preaching,” and “Homileticians and the Bible”) is excellent.

Elton John? the Carpenters? Where’s that coming from?

Music has this amazing ability to stick in the memory when all other stuff starts to leak out.

For some reason, at both services, I had to fight back a tear.

We don’t sing “Just As I Am” much anymore. It hasn’t completely disappeared, thankfully, but it’s less common.

It is, of course, THE invitation song. The one with 50 verses sung until that last white-knuckled sinner turns loose of the pew and comes forward.

Yesterday it really was an invitation to me. An invitation to ingest the words of Psalm 51 while receiving again the body and blood of Jesus. An an invitation to remember.

In my mind I traveled back to the age of 18, a freshman at Harding listening to the spell-binding words of one of my heroes (then and now), Jimmy Allen. And I also time-traveled back to the age of 21, when I began holding Gospel Meetings (not revivals–that was the Baptists!) in places like Seneca, Mount Vernon, Neosho, and Hottel Springs, Missouri.

Just as I am!
Thy love unknown
has broken every barrier down;
Now to be thine,
yea, think alone,
O Lamb of God, I come! I come!

What invitation songs (or any other spiritual songs) still take you back to sweet moments of spiritual revival?

It isn’t like everything I sang growing up was of the “Be Thou My Vision” quality. I’ve had quite enough of “You Never Mentioned Him to Me” (with those wonderful lyrics “you taught me not the light to see”–basically a guilt-inducing hymn about all the people you failed to teach the gospel and who are paying for your failures at judgment day), “Toiling On,” and “Each Day I’ll Do a Golden Deed.”

And I certainly don’t think all of the newer songs are shallow. Like in every generation, the best will live on (we’ll be singing “In Christ Alone,” “Here I Am to Worship,” and “Wonderful, Merciful Savior” fifty years from now–I hope) while others will fall to the wayside. That’s just the way it is.

AND YET . . . we just can’t let go of the best hymns. I want future generations to be nurtured by “Blessed Assurance,” “My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less,” and “Rock of Ages” — songs that taught me things about the gospel I wasn’t hearing from preaching or teaching as an adolescent. I want them to be encouraged by the depth of faith expressed in “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go” (“I trace the rainbow through the rain, and feel the promise is not vain, that morn shall tearless be”), “When Peace Like a River,” and “Be Still My Soul.” And I want them to be able to join in the generations who have stood in awe before a holy, mighty God singing “On Zion’s Glorious Summit,” “Holy, Holy, Holy,” “How Great Thou Art,” and “O Lord, Our Lord.”

Give me the old. And the new.

Be Thou my wisdom, and Thou my true word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my vision, O Ruler of all.

This will not be the most romantic Valentine’s Day, I suppose. We’re caught up in the daily tasks of helping Chris recover from the accident.

And yet . . . after all these years with the Love of my life . . . there’s something deeply romantic about it. For all these years we’ve cuddled, fought, forgiven, traveled, danced, prayed, laughed, and poured our lives into Matt, Megan, and Chris. There’s something deeply romantic about a quite evening with Diane to continue helping Chris.

For the occasion I’ve ripped a CD of some of our favorite love songs:

Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love”
Eric Clapton’s “Change the World”
Steven Curtis Chapman’s “I Will Be Here”
The Dixie Chicks’ “I Believe in Love”
Collin Raye’s “Love Remains”
Terri Clark’s “I Just Want to Be Mad” (pure eroticism)
Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle”
John Mayer’s “Your Body Is a Wonderland” (hey, we’re married!)
Dan Fogelberg’s “Make Love Stay”
Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody”
Norah Jones’s “Be Here to Love Me” and “The Nearness of You”
James Taylor’s “How Sweet It Is”
Beatles’ “Something”

Help me out here. Any glaring omissions? What are some other great love songs?

And we had a good day, too. From the outside it would probably seem like baby steps. But from the inside it was gigantic leaps. Chris is now doing some simple exercises and is able to get into a wheelchair for brief periods. He had a couple buddies come up yesterday (plus his two very attentive female cousins who are hovering around him when he’s up to it) and they watched ballgames together.

Today he has his brother and sister-in-law to watch NFL playoff games with.

There was a moment late last night when just the five of us were in the room and prayed that I thought, “Life might one day be ‘normal’ again.”

During one of those early dark nights when we were waiting on word about head and lungs, I kept searching in my Ipod for something that would comfort. It came down to one thing: Zoe music. Probably because I could hear the familiar voices and know that those very people were praying for us. The two songs that ministered the most to me were “Come, Ye Sinners” (I know the words “bruised and broken by the fall” are referring to sin . . . but for the moment that spoke to our situation) and “Be Still My Soul.”

Last night and this morning I was supposed to have been speaking at a Zoe Conference in Fresno. I know it’s going well.

Well, that’s the report from Cook’s Children’s Hospital this morning. I think my mom and I are going to slip away to early service at Richland Hills. There are so many places I’d like to go this morning: to Burleson to say thanks for all the food; to Grapevine to say thanks for the banner signed by middle schoolers; to . . . . You understand.

Thank you all so very much for your prayers. We had one note sent up by someone saying that she is a member of this blog community though we’ve never met. She just wanted us to know she’s thinking about us, praying for us, and would do anything to help if we’d call her.

Are there words in the English language to say what that means to a family in crisis?