For Wilshire Baptist Church
“If I feel like my song is sung, I don’t care if it’s short.” That’s an intriguing philosophy in one sentence — for music, for just about anything, even an entire life.
I heard those words at the end of a recording of “You Are My Sunshine” sung by Johnny Cash. I’d been hearing a snippet of it on several TV commercials for Whirlpool appliances with the theme of “Every Day, Care.” I liked the sound of it and found the full recording in which Cash sings two verses and two choruses, his rough bass-baritone starkly accompanied by acoustic guitar. When the music ends, you hear others in the studio talking about the length of the song. Someone suggests there’s another verse they could add, and that’s when Cash says it: “If I feel like my song is sung, I don’t care if it’s short.”
The song was a brief two minutes and 30 seconds, but I wonder if Cash was talking about something else? He lived just 71 years — I thought he was much older — and was in poor health and near the end of his life at the time of the recording, which was released posthumously. I wonder if he was saying that his life song was sung and that was OK. After all, he was a man known for a rock-solid faith despite a lifetime of struggles with substance abuse and a variety of serious health issues. So maybe he was saying he was finished and ready to move on.
Of course, we don’t feel that way when someone dies young, and especially not when they’ve been creative and inspirational to so many people and have so much more to give. I heard the Johnny Cash song a couple of days before learning about the death of Christian author Rachel Held Evans. Hers was a name I knew but I have never read her. I’ve learned more about her from all the tributes I’ve read and the quotes that have been shared, and it’s clear that at age 37 her life song was much too short. She had so much more to give to her readers — and most certainly to her husband, children and close friends.
There is no replacing someone like this, and naturally we struggle to make sense of it. The best we can do is keep their legacy alive by continuing to share their voice and words that touched us. We can keep sharing their talent, their love, their wisdom, their sunshine — sort of like the Whirlpool washer in one of those TV ads that keeps dispensing soap load after load.
We can also follow their lead and strive to live in a way that is so purposeful that we’ll have some confidence that we’ve sung our hearts out and told our story. Cash was known for doing that — sharing the darkness and the sunshine of his soul without hesitation — and from what I’ve read Evans did the same. Some people were put off by their unflinching honesty, but it was their song and they sang it with courage, and the rest of us are better for having heard it.
I had not intended to write about Johnny Cash, Rachel Held Evans and Whirlpool washers in one sitting, but sometimes the muse spins us around and takes us to strange places. I’ve long suspected that the so-called “muse” the poets speak of is actually the Holy Spirit.