Monday, March 30, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
It’s true folks. I was accepted to be a Human Rights Intern at International Justice Mission ( www.ijm.org ) for this summer! It was a long and unique vetting/selection process before I was finally offered a final position, but it came. I want to thank all of you who encouraged me to pursue this endeavor, I really wouldn’t have done it without you, and I already am so thankful for people who support me so whole-heartedly even if I’m not so sure why they believe in me so much! Why the crazy language of an acceptance speech? Well, mostly it is because in their field, Justice for the oppressed, IJM is second to none. Started by a man named Gary Haugen, a former attorney with the US Justice Department, who went on to become the UN investigator for the Rwandan Genocide, IJM seeks to bring justice to places and people who would otherwise not see it. This, to them, and rightfully so, is seen as the carrying out of a biblical mandate to enact justice on behalf of the poor, the orphan, the widow. I, again, could speak for some time about these things, but I’ll just let them explain it….
International Justice Mission is a human rights agency that secures justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression. IJM lawyers, investigators and aftercare professionals work with local governments to ensure victim rescue, to prosecute perpetrators and to strengthen the community and civic factors that promote functioning public justice systems.IJM's justice professionals work in their communities in 12 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America to secure tangible and sustainable protection of national laws through local court systems.
So what will I be doing? That’s a good question as I don’t know exactly, but the information I’ve received thus far says….
Human Rights interns assist IJM's attorneys with tasks related to IJM’s casework and the management of offices around the world. Although tasks vary depending on the nature of the work in progress during the internship, interns can expect their tasks to include:
1. Researching country-specific issues, current events, administrative procedures and culture;
2. Preparing support materials for presentations and reports;
3. Compiling country or topic-related briefing binders, including background research, internal reports, relevant travel information, and contact data; and
4. Participating in departmental and general IJM clerical support (approximately 25 percent of work load).
So, in short, I’ll be living in downtown Washington DC from May 31st to August 13th, taking the metro to work, wearing a suit every day, spending time with the Lord with my colleagues, and working amongst the best and the brightest for the cause of biblical justice. It sounds trite, but I’m truly humbled by the opportunity to serve there. Honestly… it’s such an honor and a privilege that I don’t always feel I deserve it. But, I, again, thank you all for your support, and would love to send out a special thanks to those who were so very instrumental in praying and encouraging me, my mom & dad, Chris, Kevin, Amanda, Opal, Sarah, Peggy, Janice, Steve & Celestia, Abby, David, Ryan, and everyone at our “house church without a name….” Thank you. I will keep you all updated as time goes on.
But for the real, and much funnier, reason I accept this internship click HERE, you won’t be disappointed! : )
God Bless, Dan
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Athiest take on God and Africa, amazing...
PLEASE READ!
As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset
Matthew Parris
Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.
It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.
I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.
But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.
First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.
At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.
We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.
Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.
This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.
It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.
There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.
I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.
Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.
How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.
To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.
And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece
As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset
Matthew Parris
Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.
It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.
I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.
But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.
First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.
At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.
We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.
Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.
This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.
It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.
There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.
I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.
Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.
How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.
To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.
And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Spring Break 2009: To Bear Witness...
Spring Break 2009: To bear witness…
Many people have wondered what my “alternative” spring break was all about… so I will tell you.
I went to the Alicar Valley in southern Arizona to learn and bear witness to what is happening on our border.
Discussions of our border and those who cross it “illegally” are rife with rhetoric that is framing the conversation quite ineffectively and erroneously. This is a major injustice both to us and to the people that cross our borders in search of a better life every day. It’s too easy to say they (the “others”, those not like “us”, “those Mexicans”) are illegal, want nothing more than to take out money/jobs, bring drugs over, and should be removed from the United States if they enter illegally. I used to draw that in as black and white as I could, allowing a perverse and over-zealous sense of nationalism to help me see past the glaring hypocrisy in my own framework of thinking. I used to, some time ago, draw that line in the sand in solidarity with the majority of the American people, who, driven by fear, in one form or the other, don’t what the “others” to be here.
I stand in solidarity with the migrants. They are my heroes in fact. Their reality, by and large, is much more black and white than ours: if they don’t come, their families may starve or live in abject poverty. This is largely due to macro-level economic factors that they have no control over. They are not a homogenous group without their own agency, but they are victims of a larger system. For brevity’s sake I won’t get into NAFTA, Cartels, US subsidies, Maquilidoras, and how these all play into the plight of the average Mexican/Honduran/Guatemalan/El Salvadoran migrant. But they come… they come for their families because they love them and want to provide for them. There is wealth in America. That is their reality. That is their black & white. Most (honestly) don’t even want to come, but feel they must. That is why their community fronts the money to get these people to the US, seeing these journeyers as a hope for sustenance and furtherance of their dreams. They usually travel hundreds or thousands of miles to reach the border, especially those from Central America, and will face severe injustice along the way. In fact, for example, most of the women who travel from Central America take birth control before their journey because they know along the way to a “better life” coyotes will rape them because that’s the method of control for their smugglers. It’s worth that much for a “better life” of economic slavery and abuse in the states. It’s worth that much to come to America where they will be “illegal” and inherently viewed as lower because they are undocumented and no one can really go to bat for an illegal immigrant. The migrants we spoke to in Mexico that were about to cross into the US were very ignorant of how far they had to go, what they should bring, what they should wear, the difficulties they would face, and even where they were going… migration north is largely controlled by the cartels who provide the coyotes and charge exorbitant amounts of money to smuggle their human cargo to “freedom”. No, these migrants are not masters of their destinies. They are victims. We mustn’t forget this, for that is their reality. But to them, it might just be worth it. That should tell the citizens of the north something…
America’s black and white is actually a lot grayer… I do not seek to attack my country or question the reason people have strong beliefs about the border issue. They, like the migrants that seek a life in the United States, aren’t born in a vacuum, but are socialized products of their environments that fiercely want to defend their way of life and their families. This is not in and of itself a bad thing. It becomes bad when it is denied to the person on the other side off the ill-thought fence that draws a line between a people who have never been apart. Our language here in the United States’ media and government is designed to draw a distinction between the human on the south side of the border with the human on the north. Dehumanization is rampant. “Illegal” is commonly used, migrant is not. “They take our jobs”, when we, have in some ways, taken theirs. Are they not our brothers and sisters? I used to, a long time ago, feel like there was a difference between them and me… but is there? I’m the son of an Italian immigrant who grew up in the “land of opportunity”… am I so different because my father has always been here legally? I don’t think so. Is the “American dream” only for those who have achieved it already?
These questions post much deeper questions than I am fit to answer here, but it does lead me to why I chose to learn about border justice issues: Because human beings, regardless of their race, legal status, sex, religion, creed, or any other criteria, don’t deserve to die in the Sonoran desert because they have sought to enter the United States. That is why No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes exists… because humanitarian aid is never a crime and all people have rights.
No Mas Muertes was born out of the sanctuary movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_movement) that started in Tucson’s Southside Presbyterian Church with pastor John Fife running the defiance. As that passed and time moved on more and more people died of exposure in the Arizona desert, the church knew it again had a job to do, and so began the Samaritans and No Mas Muertes. The rest, as they say, is history.
No Mas Muertes exists to provide humanitarian aid to migrants entering the United States. This includes, but is not limited to, medical care, water, food, and information on migrants rights. Volunteers, and everyone is a volunteer, patrol the desert for immigrants, leaving water and food on trails, to help in any way they can because hundreds if not thousands of migrants, men, women, and children of all ages, have died in our desert, and this should utterly appall us. I do not seek to appeal to emotion but to encourage everyone to construct their visuals accurately.
What No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes does is not civil disobedience. We are not sitting at the front of any buses or getting beaten by police and arrested (for the most part). You can legally provide care for migrants in any way as long as you’re not willfully furthering the journey of an “illegal migrant”. What it is then, is civil initiative. The last person found dead in the desert by NMD was a fourteen-year-old girl name Josalina . Her parent’s couldn’t even come to the memorial to see where she died because to return to the spot would be going through border patrol check points and they were, of course, undocumented. Fourteen. Did she willfully choose to make the 60+ mile trek to Tucson from Nogales? Did she want to die in our desert? No, what we at No More Deaths do is civil initiative, because regardless of what people think about border policy, a person, legal or “illegal”, in the United States has full constitutional protection and protection under multiple human rights treaties the US has signed and ratified (see article 6 of the constitution for the relevance). Our actions, then, are civil initiative because the government of our great country is turning a blind eye to the human rights catastrophe at our border. We cannot do the same. As US citizens, let alone those of us who serve a King (Hint: Son of God…) not a kingdom, it is our duty to carry out the work the government is failing to do. No More Deaths then, is doing the governments work. What a dubious distinction. The border patrol surely won’t do it. They are willfully blind to the nature of their culpability in the oppressive border system. The National Guard won’t do it (mostly because, no matter what Kid Rock says, they’re pretty worthless, I would know). The Sheriff’s office won’t do it, especially our racist and shameful excuse for an Arizonan, “Sheriff Joe”. No one will take care of the poor and oppressed (as is a biblical mandate, see Isaiah, Micah, the gospels)… so, miraculously, the church is… through the ministry, yes ministry, of No More Deaths.
A ministry? Yes, because I’ve never seen the church like I saw it there. There pastors and anarchists and hippies can dine and work together in one accord. The pastor doesn’t have to water down the truth he holds in his heart, but he doesn’t have to compromise the mission of the church either. Southside Presbyterian understands the Church; yes, the “big C” Church. I can’t even tell you what it was like to be amongst Christians who had committed their lives to justice, peace, and the gospel. Not the social gospel, but the work and life and message of our Lord Jesus Christ. They needed no platform to preach from, just a life of service and humility to lead. Mother Teresa knew something about that if I remember correctly… such men and women were there at our quaint camp in the desert. Others were there too. College students, hippies, “anarchists”, you name it. People committed to justice, even though we may not all agree on the details of such a statement…. But it was amongst these beautiful people created by the Lord that I learned of the community the church should have. I learned what disagreeing well was. People always say “Hippies just love people”… but it’s true. I was humbled by the caliber of people I was able to spend my week in the desert with. I count some of them as mentors almost. I may have a faith they claim to have never given two seconds of thought to, but we have more in common than we may believe. We, for the most part believe man is fallen and that the systems he created are inherently broken, that the world is built on injustice. This, my friends, is biblical! From there we can dialog. I didn’t walk away from that weekend believing in free love, drugs, or destroying capitalism and no one encouraged me to think those ways… but I did walk away with friendships, stories, and a witness to convictions that rivaled the most pious men of the cloth.
“They will be known by their fruit”… and real love was shown on behalf of these disparate people towards the migrants who wandered into our camp and those we found on the trails. That fruit was love, and it was plucked and served to all in camp whether American or not. Conversely what can be said about the fruit of our friends at CBP and Border Patrol? They mean well, but there are thousands of documented abuses of detained migrants at the hands of our very own US Border Patrol. Give any man power and a dehumanized victim and abuses will abound. Welcome to the reality of the migrant… who can be held for 72 hours without processing or a meal and if he happens to be the unlucky 70th migrant of the day, he’ll face 6 months in jail with no real legal options! But the real fruit is borne by our friends at Wackenhut, the Danish-owned private security company contracted by the Border Patrol who carry out the processing and deportation of migrants once captured by the Border Patrol. Hmm… it’s like the infamous Black Water (who, I admit, I detest) just not as sexy. Wackenhut undoubtedly does a decent job of fulfilling their requirements for their contract, but the real telling issue is that they are there at all. Border Patrol agents, due to being found bribable, can’t stay at one location on the border for more than 6 months, which says a lot. So… for the rest of the behind the scenes work, pay someone else to do this work for you… oh, their fruit, their fruit… the privatization of the militarization of our border… nothing makes me lose hope in something faster than when it becomes about money, and folks, there is an element of that here. I truly don’t want to get into it all… but a BP agent’s motivation for the job isn’t money but believing in the mission… can the same be said for Wackenhut? Doubtful. The fruit, I’m afraid, is rotten.
What we attempted to do then, in the desert, was live in community together, as an alternative to the hedonistic spring break rituals our culture embraces, for a common purpose: serving our brothers and sisters to the south. A migrant once told John, a Christian peacemaker serving at No More Deaths’ camp, “We know what the wall says about us, but what does it say about you?” And what does it say about us? What do we, whatever primary identity we have, American, world citizen, Christian, Socialist, Conservative, want to be said about us? What do we want to be known for not for our own sake but because of the depth of our convictions and the content of our character? The wall speaks of a nation-state’s division, willful blindness, hidden racism, and fear. Our response to this wall should speak of love, service, solidarity, and most importantly, humility.
There is so much more to be said, and I am no expert on this issue, but this is what I witnessed.
God Bless, Dan
For more information check out www.nomoredeaths.org and ASU’s 2009 Border Justice event http://www.west.asu.edu/publicaffairs/public_events/?i=770
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
my effective and efficient transportation
Because my car bit it, i decided to go ahead and take the plunge and get a motorcycle, which is a much more exciting and gas efficient form of transportation. i was not going to buy a used car for $3,000 (how much I paid for this '04 Yamaha yzf-600r) that was a decade old and had a million problems. If this thing brings, it's like $70 to get fixed and there is a lot less to break...
Anyways, thus far I love it, and I just pray I can remain safe on it...
must be asleep
you know, I used to write.
and life is so overwhelming when no one hears your silent screams for something, anything
anything that would make you sleep sounder at night. i used to write, which meant i had the words... oh Lord, show us who we are!
who are we? what is this great love inside of me? and defeat....
are we worthy? for amidst denial, grace.... i haven't the time i say... but there is so much to be said.. but you know i used to write.
and life is so overwhelming when no one hears your silent screams for something, anything
anything that would make you sleep sounder at night. i used to write, which meant i had the words... oh Lord, show us who we are!
who are we? what is this great love inside of me? and defeat....
are we worthy? for amidst denial, grace.... i haven't the time i say... but there is so much to be said.. but you know i used to write.
Contact...
Written by As Cities Burn
Hearts aren't really our guides.
We are truly alone.
'Cause God ain't up in the sky,
Holding together our bones.
Remember we used to speak.
Now I'm starting to think,
Your voice was really my own,
Bouncing off the ceiling back to me.
God, this can't be.
God, this can't be,
God, could it be that all we see is it?
Come down, heaven.
Won't you come down?
Won't you cut through the clouds?
Won't you come down?
Oh, my heaven, why do you have doors to close?
Do you have clouds to stop his voice on the way down?
God, this can't be.
God, this can't be,
God, could it be that all we see is it?
God, does grace reach to this side of madness?
'Cause I know this can't be,
The great peace we all seek.
Come down, heaven.
Won't you come down?
Won't you cut through the clouds?
Won't you come down?
Hearts aren't really our guides.
We are truly alone.
'Cause God ain't up in the sky,
Holding together our bones.
Remember we used to speak.
Now I'm starting to think,
Your voice was really my own,
Bouncing off the ceiling back to me.
God, this can't be.
God, this can't be,
God, could it be that all we see is it?
Come down, heaven.
Won't you come down?
Won't you cut through the clouds?
Won't you come down?
Oh, my heaven, why do you have doors to close?
Do you have clouds to stop his voice on the way down?
God, this can't be.
God, this can't be,
God, could it be that all we see is it?
God, does grace reach to this side of madness?
'Cause I know this can't be,
The great peace we all seek.
Come down, heaven.
Won't you come down?
Won't you cut through the clouds?
Won't you come down?
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