Sermon Notes from Johnny

I love Johnny Cash. I even considered naming my youngest son Kash.  I love his story, more over his testimony and his ministry. Wait? You didn't know Johnny Cash had a ministry? He did. It was his music.  It was the hope that he brought people by being able to relate to them right where they are at. He understood the plight of the society's outcast, those that were in pain, the downtrodden.

Often times, we think ministry is equivalent to some type of formal job, like a pastor, sunday school teacher etc.  really those are all just titles of what we all really called to do in our everyday lives.  We are all called to minister to others. For some that looks like a Mother at home with her children, teaching them, and praising God over the dishes, for others that could be encouraging people while serving them food.  I believe you can minister to others while flipping burgers just as easily as someone called to stand up and preach from a pulpit.  Its a way of life not a day job. 

Ok back to my love for Johnny... Johnny went into prisons and brought them music. Big deal. Right? Tell that to Glen Sherley.  He wrote the song "Greystone Chapel" that Johnny sang and recorded inside Folsom prison.  Johnny knew that people were able to be redeemed just as he proclaimed to be.  His prison ministry offered hope and love and compassion for people that needed hope needed someone to care. I think Johnny understood exactly what his ministry was and what it meant to care for the "least of these" 

While I have only known Johnny through his music and stories that are made public, his life has been one of a constant sermon for me. I have learned about God's heart for others through the ministry of Johnny Cash. For those of you that are reading this and saying well, maybe that was all hype and for publicity, I will offer you the words that Roseanne Cash (Johnny's daughter) said about him during a tribute concert of her late father... 

"My fathers integrity as an artist is the same integrity that informed him as a parent. When I was a teenager I was laying on the bed in room reading a book on astrology, and my dad walked in and asked me what i was reading and i handed him the book and said you dont really believe in this do you and he said no but I do think you should find out everything you can about it. and that one comment became the  template in which I based my entire philosophy of parenting on, trust, respect and a wide open mind. my fathers own wide open mind explored an immense universe of ideas, sound beauty mystery love pain and rhythm. He offered that universe to us as our birthright to delight in our own treasures and slam up against our own walls always knowing that his love was close at hand.  His heart was so expansive and his mind so finely tuned that he could contain both darkness and light, love and trouble, fear and faith, wholeness and shatterdness,, addiction and enlightenment, old school and post modern,  Baptist and Jew, the sacred and the silly, God and the void, but always and relentlessly with the back beat and the rhythm driving the paradoxes. Daddy was a tremendous energy source a radiant center of love in our lives and I cannot begin to describe the enormity of the empty space he has left. A friend told me that your parents keep teaching you even after they are gone and  my sisters and my brother and I have already found that to be true he keeps pointing us in the direction of our best selves.  His humble and luminious spirit  resonate so deeply in all of our lives and I believe it always will. Because Daddy understood his paradoxes so well he also knew that every day held a choice to be made. I cannot count the times we heard him say children you can choose love or hate I choose love, so I tell you and him tonight from our own wide universe of choices, Daddy we also choose love...and rhythm.-Roseanne Cash "

For New Years, I am challenging you that you become aware of what your ministry is in your everyday life and do it passionately and with all your heart for the glory of God, no matter how unorthodox that appears to be. 

Choose Love Journeyers and Be blessed wildly, 

wendy xoxoxoxo 

ps. Here is some Johnny for you...