His Eye is On the Sparrow

Week 2: “His Eye is on the Sparrow”

His Eye is on the Sparrow was made into one of the more famous older spiritual songs by a scene from Sister Act 2, sung by Lauryn Hill in one of her only movie performances. It evokes a sense of the more Southern Baptist or Pentecostal traditions of worship with a greater emphasis on personal love and spirit that can sometimes be lacking in more formal hymns.

Personal note: I was pretty sure that at least part of the song was somewhere in the psalms or proverbs, but the song is only a passing reference to Matthew 10: 28-31. Maybe its just owed to the fact that it seems like something David would have written while being chased through caves by Saul or waiting to hear if his newborn son would survive the wrath he had brought on his own head.

Of course, that doesn’t deter me from deconstructing this beautiful and emotional ballad to God. In some ways, I think about this song around Easter because it reminds me of beautiful flowers laid around an altar between Good Friday and Greatest Sunday (the Resurrection). In my family, those flowers serve as a tradition of remembrance for a loved one that has passed on- usually grandparents- and somehow Easter lilies are a stronger reminder of my grandmother than most things.

Week 2: "His Eye is on the Sparrow": http://youtu.be/_eAboY5zfYE

I find this song to be ironic almost. When you read it, when you sing it, it just doesn’t seem like an inherently happy song. The pace is not quick, people generally don’t dance in the aisles to it, and its usually sung by a second alto with a deep, soulful voice. I think, those same idiosyncrasies actually highlight the fact that it is a worship song of joy and depth for all those whose love from God and hopefully for God runs deep. Now, I want you to stop and let the opening lines sink in a bit.

Why should I feel discouraged? Why should the shadows come?
Those are some pretty intense questions to ask yourself, considering that there always seems to be a reason to feel discouraged. Heck, I was my friendly neighborhood Tree of Life Christian Bookstore this week and I saw tons of books devoted to varying topics of how to banish discouragement in all areas of life. Stuff like :

Raising teenagers (to LOVE God!)

Finance (or lack thereof) (and GIVING them TO GOD!)

Understanding marriage (And How God Wants You to Connect With Your Husband!)

Connecting with God (On A DAILY Basis)

Spiritually leading your household (Men’s section/Business)

I don’t want to get into the topic of why Men’s Leadership/Business were melded together and was only one bookshelf long, but I’m sure I’ll derail myself eventually and discuss it sometime in the future. I should also state here that while there is a bit of sarcasm in the above book sections/title selections, I don’t inherently believe that it is bad to want to instruct your children in the ways of God, give God the glory he deserves through your earnings, trying to reconnect with your spouse, doing devotionals, or even being the spiritual leader of your house - I’m just not thoroughly convinced that most American Christian bookstores are doing it right.

I’m tempted to believe that those questions (about discouragement and shadows) were originally posed to a different set of circumstances. Its not unrealistic to assume that lower mortality rates, the amount of households with abusive or alcoholic husband, and the stigma of being an unwed mother or gay person in different periods of history (and that’s just in America) gives the question something more jarring and realistic.

I myself have often felt discouraged with God. I read that Footprints poem about God carrying us when we could no longer walk on the sand and I love its romance and grandeur, but let’s face it, folks- sometimes, life with God feels like you’re just sitting in the road and you’re too bruised to move on. Especially if you’re the mother with the gay son. The father who has to stage an intervention for his brother’s drug use. The social worker who has to watch a 15 year old get kicked out of her home. Divorce after 20 years of marriage. Losing a job. Losing a scholarship. Your first driving ticket. Losing your first love. Being passed over for a promotion.

Sometimes it feels like the question is Why shouldn’t we feel discouraged? Why shouldn’t the shadows come? Why shouldn’t my heart be lonely and long for heaven and home?

I don’t want to give you a pep talk.  It can sometimes feel insulting if you understand how it feels to utter the above questions in dark and hard times, when rebuilding your relationship with God is harder than anything you’ve ever done before. At some stage, you’re past a point where putting a couple bucks in the plate is gonna do it for you and people are telling you that you can just pray through it and trust God and it’ll all be okay….

And you just sometimes wonder if those people have ever felt anything like what you’ve felt and you simultaneously both wish and never want them to feel it - whatever it is. And you have to resist stabbing them with your fork at the church social.

But there hope in this song, even in just the next moment when we find that Jesus is our portion, our constant friend is he (some versions use that as a pre-chorus, others in the chorus itself- depends on the arrangement mostly).

Please take a moment to flip to the story in Gospel of John, Chapter 4 of the Samaritan woman at the well.

As far as Jesus being our portion, one of the best references for that is the above meeting between Jesus and the woman at the well. He reveals himself as clean water that will fill, refresh, and purify. I can imagine that for the woman, it must have been a dumbfounding moment. I’m not familiar with Samaritan culture, but five husbands must have been a stigma even for them. What did that woman know of life? Loneliness, anxiety, being ostracized?

But she responded differently than most of us do to Jesus (sometimes even beyond just the first time we meet him). But, seeing as how I’m currently one of the folks drinking the Living Water and receiving joy and thankfulness from it, I want to say that I admire how she responds. Because, in all fairness, we deserve less than her for our mistrust and adultery and idolatry and so much more. We don’t deserve a portion of God, Living Water, a communion with which to remember him by. We are reminded, sometimes constantly, of our sin and that we merely deserve death (the wages of sin being death).

But God offers the same grace and mercy that he offers to the woman at the well that may have been waiting her whole life for someone like Jesus, without even knowing what she was looking for. In some ways, Jesus was her Footprints in the sand.

I can also imagine that the ending of this week’s song came to the woman much later, in the quiet stillness of her home, at a place where Daniel and David both found communion with the God of their Fathers. Maybe no longer with the fifth in a long line of men, maybe now with some hateful fires of her soul quenched by the soothing water of God, she could sing, quietly, breathing:

I sing because I’m happy

I sing because I’m free

I sit here, typing, overwhelmed by the simplicity and by the implications of those lines in this song and what they could represent if we choose them. In this age, we often chose polite cynicism, atheism or embarrassment in the faces of the shouting Tea Partiers, or apathy when we turn away from the Occupy protesters because we believe in good intentions but that small voices are never loud enough, or because we believe all good and true things have been bartered and sold until there are none left on the face of the earth. And I believe this song would dispute that claim, using a small and defenseless bird much like Jesus would later describe lilies and grass and how they are cared for and clothed in greater splendor than Solomon (Matthew 6:29):

I sing because I’m happy

I sing because I’m free

His eye is on the sparrow

And I know He watches me.

I suppose you could still choose cynicism, atheism, embarrassment, or even soul pollution. I’m certainly not going to stop you from that. But I want to choose differently for myself. I want to choose to believe that He watches over me (in fact, I know he has, but I still feel like I need to choose it everyday or lose myself to cynicism).

I got the inspiration for this week’s song from Diana Ross’s Memoir entitled “Secrets of a Sparrow”. I picked this particular celebrity bio in the manner I usually pick library books, wandering the aisles of tomes until something sticks out.

Miss Ross is a fan of knowing she is watched over and protected and maybe we should take this week to think about that. Even if you don’t feel like you’ve been watched over, even if you feel like you’ve been passed over, take some time and write out some major or minor events of the past that have happened.

If you’re angry with talk, talk to Him about it- ask him where he was. (I used to have a lot of trouble being angry with God, but my friends also used to remind me that he was a big God and could take me being angry with him- they just wanted me to talk with him and I advise you the same). If you find that he lead you to a certain place through these events that was all for the best, thank him for it.

Remember: God doesn’t need us as much as we need him. You not believing in him will not change whether or not he exists. Dear ones, he wants us, its that simple. At the base of theology is his love in creating us and not chaining us to an empty faith. As hard as it may seem and as much as we sometimes see past experience to the contrary, its true. God merely wants us.

Thanks for reading,

This is John- signing off