NOTEworthy November 15

Soon ah will be done / I Wanna Die Easy – arranged by Craig Hella Johnson

Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world
Goin’ home to live with God

No more weeping and a wailing
I’m goin’ to live with God

I want to meet my mother
I’m going to live with God

I wanna die easy when I die
Shout salvation as I fly

I wanna see my mother when I die
Shout salvation as I fly

I’m going home to live with God

Traditional Lyrics

Whether we’d hoped to or not, I think a lot of us have been thinking about home a lot this year. Maybe it’s finally painting that room you’ve been wanting to paint, renovating the bathroom, or getting some patio furniture so there’s at least one more usable space. Beyond even the physical place of home, I imagine many of us are thinking about the other homes we are missing: the warm home of family and friends that used to be a plane flight away but now seem….further. Those who share our homes are, at times, maybe a little too close sometimes.

Whatever way we are dealing with home right now, I think it is safe to say that we are all realizing just how multifaceted that idea really is. As Pico Iyer says in his TED Talk, Where Is Home?, “[our] whole life will be spent taking pieces of many different places and putting them together into a stained glass whole. Home for [us] is really a work in progress. It’s like a project on which [we’re] constantly adding upgrades and improvements and corrections.”

So far we’ve talked about a physical home, Place, and a relational home, our family and friends, but we haven’t yet touched on our spiritual homes.

Yes, that was plural for a reason.

Most often, when we speak of a spiritual home, we talk of heaven – as they do in this piece – and when we talk of this spiritual home, we tend to weave in aspects of those other homes we experience on earth. As is done in this piece, heaven is a place of restored relationships, of meeting the mother you never knew, or being reunited with the one that you lost. In other songs and stories, we talk about “bright mansions above” or “the golden avenue.”

However, there is one home forgotten in these portrayals – the home of self.

Andy Eaton
Director of Music
First Presbyterian Church

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