That Where I Am, There You May Also Be

Scripture — John 14:1-7 (NRSV)

Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

Devotion

I am currently in my fifties and thus a card-carrying member of Generation X. This means a fair number of things culturally, of course. For one thing, the card we all carried was surely a video rental card from Blockbuster! (And now it’s an AARP card.) I had a Cabbage Patch Kid. I did in fact drink out of the garden hose with amazing regularity. I wore neon and pastels and a great deal of hairspray and roamed the mall for hours. I distinctly remember the Challenger explosion (I was in high school at the time) and was heartened recently to hear that Artemis II carried to space pieces both of Challenger and Columbia. And—in a particular cultural touchstone for those of us who were Christian youth and young adults at the time—I remember where I was when I heard that Rich Mullins died.

Some of you may already know who Mullins is, of course. For those who don’t, he was a famous Christian songwriter, born in Indiana in 1955 and killed in a car crash in Illinois in 1997. (You can still go visit his grave today.) Some of his songs (such as “Sing Your Praise to the Lord,” a hit for Amy Grant) became most famous when recorded by others, but he also had an extensive career writing and performing his own songs, with eight award-winning studio albums released before his death and countless memorable songs.

Mullins always had an uneasy relationship with fame and with the machinery of music-making, including Christian music-making, and he wasn’t afraid to speak of, as he once wrote, “just how long a night can get.” Though his song “Awesome God” became one of the most famous contemporary Christian worship songs of the late twentieth century, most of his work rejected easy answers and probed the hard times and dark nights of the Christian journey. After his death, Grant called him “the uneasy conscience of Christian music.”

On September 10, 1997, a little over a week before his death on September 19, Mullins went into an abandoned church with a few friends and recorded demos with a cheap cassette tape recorder of what he hoped would be his ninth studio album. It was, but he was not there to see it. In 1998 his friends and colleagues released what they called The Jesus Record, which contained Mullins’ demo songs as well as studio recordings of the songs. The last song, “That Where I Am, There You…” is based on this passage, of course. The version on the studio recording contains the demo and tracks from many of Mullins’ friends, so that it starts with just the sound of an out-of-tune guitar echoing off of empty church walls and ends up sounding like the entire hosts of heaven have joined in. (You’ll get a chance to hear it below.)

The story of Mullins’ life is a fascinating reflection on Christianity and fame and grace and struggle in the late twentieth century, but that’s not the only reason I have told you all of this today as we ponder John 14. I think of Rich Mullins as I hear Jesus say to his friends: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” There is faith that is untroubled because it has never known trouble; and then there is the faith that has come out of trouble to the other side clinging to Jesus for dear life all the way. That’s the kind of faith Mullins had and the kind I’ve got. And I think, given what was ahead of Jesus and his disciples after the Last Supper, it’s the kind that our Lord was speaking of here. Terrible things may happen. Dark nights may loom. Pain and confusion may find us everywhere. But the Lord goes ahead to prepare a place for us, and we can trust the knowledge that where he is, one day there we will also be.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: The Importance of Workplace Relationships (John 14-17).