Wide Open Spaces - by Jim Palmer

These lyrics written in the early 1960s entered into my world fifty years later via e-mail. The author of the e-mail intentionally altered the lyrics to form a different question, which may end up as one of the most important queries of our day.

Pete Seeger’s folk song takes you through a cycle of loss from beginning to end, to beginning again. In the first verse the flowers are gone because little girls picked them all. The little girls grow up, get married, and move on with life and they are gone. Their husbands become soldiers, go off to war, are killed and buried in graveyards, gone once again. Eventually the graveyards disappear, overtaken by flowers. The little girls return picking the flowers, repeating the tragic tale yet again. Finishing as it starts the song asks, “Where have all the flowers gone?”

The e-mail arrived early one morning from my neighbor friend Judie. Part of getting to know Judie involved sharing our respective spiritual journeys. I shared how discovering God’s unconditional love and acceptance in Christ was changing me. We both experienced Jesus as love and peace, and we were encouraged by Jesus identifying these as distinguishing characteristics of his disciples. Judie is someone who holds the highest regard for Jesus Christ and considers him her role model, yet she never dug into the world of religion, nor its accompanying teachings and specifics about the life of Christ. Let’s just say her interactions with Christians didn’t spark a motivation to engage whatever it was they were focusing on. In one conversation, I mentioned that Jesus’ first followers lived out his example and teachings with such devotion they became known as “little Christs.”

Judie had been mulling over my “little Christs” comment and came to a disturbing conclusion, which she expressed in her e-mail. Jesus’ message, displayed in his life, was love and peace. His first followers accepted that reality and lived it. But pondering the present world and her own life experiences, she was left to wonder, “I kept hearing the song ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ in my head, except I was hearing it with the words ‘little Christs’ . . . ‘Where have all the little Christs gone?’” It was more than a clever rhetorical question. Even though her personal goal in life is being the same love Jesus is, Judie didn’t seem to cross paths with many choosing to live this way, though many people call themselves Christians.

She has a point. Many people choose to fill their world with hate, hurt, division, fear, and despair even though we are all desperate for love and peace. Statistically, the world is chock full of “Christians”—intelligent Christians, artistic Christians, successful Christians, church-going Christians, politically active Christians—but what about “little Christ” Christians? Christians who risk everything for love? What about Christians who love indiscriminately, unconditionally, and sacrificially? Apparently, these kinds of Christ-followers are MIA. Every now and then, one like Mother Teresa pops up and we practically create a cult around them because they live an existence so decisively beyond our normal way of living.

I worried a bit that perhaps I talked too much about love in this book. What I’m finding myself is that virtually every aspect of knowing God is related to love. Here are several examples of how love altered my understanding of God and my relationship with him and others.

Wide Open Spaces: Beyond Paint by Number Christianity

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