Jump on it

Hey Everybody,

I finally heard the new Pat Terry album this week. It’s only been 25 years since his last one. During that time he has written country hits for people like Travis Trit, Foster and Lloyd and others. In the 70’s he was the sweet heart of the contemporary Christian music scene. Somewhere along the line he started writing songs that were truthful, honest and based in the real world and it wasn’t long after that that he faded from the radar of the Christian music industry. One thing that’s not allowed in the Christian entertainment industry is honesty. Why should Christians tell the truth when they can sell fiction? Nobody wants to hear the truth.

The last three albums that he did impacted the way I understood the faith and the world in a deep way. Though they went out of print almost the day after they were released I still pull out my vinyl copies from time to time and I am always blown away. In a perfect world, I would have signed both Pat and his good friend, Mark Heard, to my fleeting and nearly imaginary record label in the early nineties but I went broke, Mark died, and Pat developed his writing skills in the country music industry.

His new album, called Laugh for a Million Years, is a masterpiece of presupositional art work. Pat simply assumes a Christian world view and writes accordingly. The result is a set of songs that deal with life, especially in the south, as it is: painful, hopeful, funny, faithful and meaningful while turning up truths in parts of society most of us would like to turn our backs on as if they were non- existent.

One such song is called Jump on It:

Granny’s on the front porch spittin’ in a cup.
Trying’ to fix a nightgown that the dog tore up.
Momma’s old clothes line finally bit the dust
Brother got a broomstick and propped it back up.
Coulda had a dyer or a sewing machine but daddy went and bought us a Trampoline
And we jump on it every chance we get Momma and Daddy and all us kids
We ain’t got much but we got this and we jump on it.

Brother does back flips with his eyes bugged out
Daddy says the back flip is what it’s all about
The whole town’s talkin’ they say it looks
like some white trash circus has hit the neighborhood
But we don’t know what in the world they mean
Momma says they’re jealous of our trampoline
And we jump on it every chance we get Momma and Daddy and all us kids
We ain’t got much but we got this and we jump on it.

Daddy says life is such a crazy mess
You gotta jump on your chances for some happiness
We all see what Daddy means way up here on this trampoline
And we jump on it every chance we get
Momma and Daddy and all us kids
We ain’t got much but we sure got this and we jump on it.


Maybe you think that’s a waste of words, I don’t know, but when I hear that I’m afraid I know people whose lives are so broken, they've been beaten down to the point of utter dysfunction so badly that all they want is a trampoline.

And it’s nice to say to them come to Jesus and everything will be ok. But when they come their brokenness seems to be too big for the Jesus we serve to do anything with them. And after awhile we just wish they’d go be someone else’s charity case or go buy a trampoline. Our Jesus is too small. Our God is too impotent. Our ideas of what salvation is supposed to be are too fictitious to do any good when the rubber hits the road and to be honest the hurting know that better than we (the liars who hide their pain) do and so often times they do opt for the trampoline.

I was talking to a friend the other day and we got to telling our stories which ended up being scarily similar in different ways. The common theme was the pain of life driving us deeper into Christ. The pain came – unexpectedly and instead of running from it we both chose to jump on it and though it hurt like hell and we wouldn’t wish it on our enemies; we both agreed it was the best thing that could have happened to us.

Every day offers us the opportunity to jump on it. We can jump on life or we can jump on death. We have the choice. Choose this day whom you will serve. I have a choice every day: Do I take the hard road of life or the easy road of death? Do I just go with the flow of culture and sit on my gluteus maximus in front of whatever form of entertainment that happens to be available? Do I jump on the trampoline of life or the trampoline of death? It sounds easy but it’s not. That’s why we have to choose every day, every minute of every day and when we choose wrong we repent and choose again.

The trampoline of life is there before you: Choose to Jump on it today.

Grace and Peace,

Brad