Rich Mullins on Being Ignored

Yesterday at work I got an email asking me to put a certain item into the ongoing spreadsheet that I need to complete every two weeks.  No big deal there, same old routine.  However, the email was forwarded to me from my team lead.  A person in another department had sent it to her.  The person who created the email had said that it had taken her two days to put everything together, so could we please post as soon as possible.  My team lead included a very nice note that she'd thought she'd sent it to me and hadn't, and that we would post as soon as possible.

It's entirely possible that the person who created the spreadsheet accepted that explanation and didn't mind the delay.  I know I'd have been upset if I'd worked for two days on something, then sent it off marked "urgent" and the person I'd sent it to had forgotten to forward to the appropriate person so it sat an additional two weeks.

The situation I flashed back to happened many years ago.  When I was an older child -- maybe twelve or thirteen -- Dad got the bright idea that he could pay me to be his office assistant.  That continued until I left home for good at twenty two, and I even put it on my resume when I didn't have any other work experiences to list.  The most significant work he gave me had to do with his doctoral project.  After we returned from the mission field, Dad was originally a Missions Professor, and that was the field that, given his choice, he'd have remained in for the rest of his working life.  (Some rather complicated and painful circumstances led him to going into the pastorate, but that's a different story.)  When Dad was still working as the professor of missions, he embarked on doctoral studies in Missions.  I believe he was a pastor by the time he got to his Doctoral Project.  Dad and I referred to it simply as "Project," and he spent -- I want to say three years on it before finally giving the whole thing up.  Dad's premise was that Free Church missionaries are "chained" to the idea that they have to repeat the actions of the book of Acts in the Bible, but in fact, Acts is descriptive rather than prescriptive and the ultimate intent is more complicated.  I learned a great deal of the same ideas behind Bible interpretation in Intro to Bible at my first college.  Anyway, I became Dad's editor.  I suppose you could call me ghost writer / rewriter by the end; I made a lot of comments and even suggested rewriting his whole paper with the underlying idea being "are you listening to me?"

Maybe it was ironic that in the end, Dad scrapped the whole idea and didn't understand why I cared.  Or maybe he just decided that I shouldn't care, therefore he wouldn't hear me when I expressed that I did.  But I'd been with him through three drafts of this paper.  I'd spent hours in-between the Greyhound trips I'd been taking to visit friends, painstakingly making tiny notes in the margins.  Dad's grammar and syntax isn't bad (at least in terms of a pastor -- I swear pastors' handwriting is worse than doctors').  But his conception of paragraph grouping and clear sentence progression is fuzzy, and he doesn't have a good grasp on the concept of thesis.  Also, theology papers (I forget the technical name) have a slightly different structure than ordinary college essays, and I never did grasp that fully (as my theology-major college roommate can attest to -- I wasn't her preferred editor).  Anyway, I'd done my best to fix what I could without departing from the standard structure, and to understand the context within which Dad was arguing.  And I did wind up making it all much more readable.  Since Dad had paid me for all of it, he thought that my interest should stop there.  It was his Project, not a Dad-and-Alicia project.  But I just felt in the end like all my efforts had been wasted.

There's a line I wrote in one of my poems not too long after that: "your treasure wasn't thrown away."  Somehow -- in a display of mixed metaphors with Bible interpretation that would have horrified Dad if I'd ever had the bad sense to tell him about it -- I'd morphed the idea "our treasure is in Heaven" with "all my efforts in this world, although they look as if they're falling on deaf ears who would rather I wasn't here at all, are actually treasure that will shine someday."  Bad theology?  Maybe.

But through all of that, I clung to the lyrics of one of the lesser-known Rich Mullins songs, "The Breaks."  It's actually simpler than I made it out to be.  The song was written in Ireland, to a girl whose relationship with Rich wasn't going anywhere.  But there are layers upon layers.

Upon first glance, the chorus doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the song:

It is the sea that makes the sailor, and the land that shapes the sea
I do not know yet what I am made of, or all I may someday be
It is wood that makes the carpenter, it's the very tools of his trade
It is love that makes the lover, and a cross that makes a saint

There's a line just before the chorus that makes it fit for me, though.  "Of all of the stupid things I've ever said, this could be the worst, maybe the best, but those are the breaks."

My reading, and I know this could be very different than the intended reading (but I don't care):
The poem in the middle: "it is the sea that makes the sailor..." -- that was like my coworker's spreadsheet, or my efforts on my dad's dissertation, or like any poem that goes unread or story that goes unwritten.  It may be the dumbest thing we've ever produced, or it may be the most beautiful, but it doesn't matter.  It's ignored.

In that context, some of the other lines of the song become lines that I live my life by:

Here is my heart, take what you want.  I have no use for it anymore.  Well, of all of the stupid things I've ever said, this could be the worst, maybe the best, but those are the breaks.  These are the bruises.  If I can't give myself away, I'm the only one who loses, and I don't want to lose this.

Emphasis mine.  I can't tell you how many times that idea has sparked me into trying -- writing down the poem that would otherwise drift free-form around in my head, creating the journal, making the collage or the video.  Even now I have a video idea that will take forever (and no, not the Suikoden one, this one is a lot more personal).  ... And the thing is, the vast majority of it has been ignored.  And that never stops hurting, and no matter how many people tell me I should write for myself and not care what anyone else thinks, to me writing for myself is called daydreaming.  Writing things down is about trying to give them away.  But I don't want to lose the treasures, and -- just like Rich's poem in the chorus -- just as long as I can still give myself away, there's still a chance.

Here is my song, listen if you want.  I have no heart for it anymore.  I've half a mind just to cut it loose, and if it sails off into the blues, then I'll just let it soar, and the skies better keep it, and I won't be any poorer for giving it its freedom.  So here's one for freedom.

There's a concept in my favorite Harry Potter fanfic: that goblin-made artifacts retain a portion of their makers' personalities -- almost like an echo of their souls.  I like to think that the things I make have an echo of who I am.  Even if no one ever sees that in this life, that's not the point.  I won't be any poorer for letting everything I make soar off into the blues.  And there might be angels out there listening.