Ready to Ride
Sixth Street, sun is going down;
Pavement’s cool underneath.
A vagrant, so they say in town;
Seems like mercy can’t compete.Sleeping in a doorway
Near the docks of Oyster Bay.
Thirteen years of carrying shame,
Never hearing the voice of the One who took his blame.
A whisper—
He raised his head . . .Surrendered out, do you believe,
Are you ready to ride the train?
Abandoned not by love, you’ll see,
If you’re ready to ride.A one-piece paper suitcase;
A past whose future was foretold.
A life not made for dying;
Instead the mystery began to unfold.
Unfolding—
He raised his head . . .Chorus
Bridge
Born into despair an orphan child—
Will You care for me?
And like the train that saved me,
Adopted in by love eternally.Opening His arms, He wants you rich, you poor, you black, you white;
Receive His love that runs so deep and high and long and wide.ChorusWords and music: Matt Berry
© 1998 Photon Music
From the album Clear, by Clear
My thanks to Bill for directing my attention to this song; he posted the video and got the song stuck in my head, so I went out and bought the CD (which was dirt cheap on SecondSpin, at least). I’ve been thinking about the lyrics off and on ever since. It’s not the greatest lyric I’ve ever run across (it seems to me the bridge gets a little muddled for a moment), but I love the song’s central image, which I think the video captures quite well. In particular, I think there are two things this lyric gets at which we too often forget.One, we are the vagrant in the face of God’s mercy and grace; as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, we are the beggars at the foot of God’s door. We none of us earn our way to God; we can only accept his unearned (and too often unwelcome) invitation. By mercy and that alone we live.Two, God’s invitation to us isn’t to some private little one-on-one thing, it’s to ride the train. When you get on the train, you share the journey with whoever else is on there, and the train goes where it’s going to go; you have no control over where it’s going—that was determined by the one who set the route for the rails—or who your companions are. You’re all in the journey together; your only choice is to take it or get off. It seems to me that’s a wonderful metaphor for the life of faith. It’s not like driving our own car, because we don’t have the freedom to pick the route or set our own speed—God does that—or to make the journey on our own, because we become fellow travelers with the rest of the people of God, whether we always appreciate that fact or not. The train, the church, is going, God knows who and where and why and how fast, and he simply invites us to climb aboard and take our part in what he already has in process.”The worship God is seeking relies completely on His initiative, knowing that the only true expression of worship is through the abandonment of all our agendas for His, as we trust in His sovereign power and unlimited grace . . .”