THE 11TH COMMANDMENT: THOU SHALT WORK

Pierre Fontenot Thursday, November 19, 2015 Comments Off on THE 11TH COMMANDMENT: THOU SHALT WORK
THE 11TH COMMANDMENT: THOU SHALT WORK

Long before he met Don Henley, long before The Eagles, Glenn Frey was just another Detroit boy who liked music and had some want-to.  The want-to took him to Los Angeles, where a girlfriend introduced him to J. D. Souther, another musician.  The two of them soon met singer/songwriter, Jackson Browne.

Jackson Browne, “I’d show up at their gigs and they’d show up at mine.  I needed to ‘economize’ so I moved into a basement beneath their apartment.  My rent was $35.”

Glenn Frey, “It had just one door, just a cubby hole, probably illegal.”

Jackson Browne, “It was big enough for a stereo, a bed, a piano…and a teapot.”

Glenn Frey, “We slept late in those days…except around 9 in the morning I’d hear Jackson Browne’s teapot…and then I’d hear him play piano.  I didn’t really know how to write songs.  I knew I wanted to…but do you just wait around for inspiration?  Well, I learned, through Jackson’s ceiling and my floor…

“Jackson would get up, play the first verse and first chorus, and he’d play it twenty times, until he had it just the way he wanted.  Then there’d be silence…and I’d hear the teapot go off.  It’d be quiet for ten or twenty minutes, then he’d start to play again.  There’d be a second verse, and he’d play it twenty times.  And then he’d go to the top, play the first verse and the first chorus and the second verse…and he’d change a word here and there…

“…and I’m up there going, ‘So that’s how you do it!’  Elbow grease.  Time.  Thought.  Persistence.”

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This Daily Bread Thing…

If you cherry pick Bible verses you can make the Black Book look like a genie bottle. Rub it and out pops smoke and all you gotta do is be smart with the three wishes.  Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find…

…and yet cemeteries are filled with people who sought love and never found it, asked for healing and died anyway…

My father, the preacher…he spent his life grinding against Bible verses, seeking truth in the words, beneath the words, in the spine of the words.  He went left when he should’ve gone right, started when he should’ve stopped, but in his old age he’d found a faith that worked, which he’d reduced from complexity to simplicity.

“We should pray for our daily bread,” he’d say, “but God expects us to do our own baking.”

Baking is work…but is work Work…or is work a gift?

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There Is Grace In No Free Lunch

I grew on a farm.  I was putting in man hours on a tractor long before I had a driver’s license.  Summer vacation, all my town friends knocking out a few morning chores, and then living a Leave It To Beaver life, while here I was on a Case 930, making dirt smaller, diesel smoke in my face, June sun cooking my gimme hat, from dew down to sun down, $7 a day.

Ole school tractors, no cab, no a/c, no radio, no nuttin.  Fuel up, grease up. then ten solid hours of round and round, all by yourself, day after day…the kind of thing that’ll get you thinking you got it bad…until I met someone who had it worse.

I’ll never forget the first time I was around a Little Rich Kid.  He was like a bell with no ringer, a shape but no sound.  He didn’t know Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey, or that most nuts on a plow are 9/16, but grab one socket bigger and smaller, just in case.

That impression has held, and been reinforced through the decades.  The people most hollow, with the most echo, are those who had it too easy, and haven’t done the work of life.

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Glenn Frey did the work.  He’d already taught himself how to play guitar; now he taught himself how to write songs.    He pulled a band together, and began the work of going from here-we-go to let’s-see-how-good-we-can-be.

Go research around on the history of rock music and you’ll find The Eagles at the top of best selling albums of all time, because their songs touch us; they touch us because somebody did the work to make them touching.

Their first hit was a song called Take It Easy, which is ironic, because everything about greatness is anything but easy…

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I’ll Avoid The Butterfly And Cocoon Analogy…but go ahead and think about it, since you already are…

God gives us the gift of life, and a mixed assortment of traits.  Whatever talents we have, they’re chips off God’s block.  He could just make us the audience, and we could clap, at how cool He is, but instead He’s put us on stage, and it’s Him in the audience, watching us figure out who we are, what we’re best at, and what we’re supposed to do, with our talents and lives.

I’ve often joked, wondering why Jesus came before mankind had figured out Community Coffee and comfortable footwear…but I believe it was fitting that He arrive at a time where living was all manual labor.

For most of the New Testament Jesus walked.  Only at the end, did He upgrade, and get to ride a donkey.

His mother, yes, her, even her, she baked their daily bread.

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This edition of Uncle P’s Bedtimes Stories is brought to you by Eighty-one, which encourages you to be about the labor of living, which is the labor that creates and reveals.

Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories can be found on Eighty-one’s Facebook page.  You can reach Uncle P at 81creativity@gmail.com.

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