O Lord, You're Beautiful -- Keith Green

 

It was a prayer in the middle of a sleepless night, and the result of this episode was one that Keith Green wasn’t afraid to share. (This most likely took place in Garden Valley TX [Smith County], where the Greens’ [Keith and Melody] Last Days Ministries was located in 1980.) He’d said “Oh Lord, You’re Beautiful”, and yet that compliment to God was not the entirety of what he had to say in this prayer. Keith also confessed some things, admitting that there were gaps in his devotion to the One who created and saved him. Adoration, and confession, and finally supplication were also present in Keith’s approach, so apparently he had three of the four letters in the ACTS acronym that so many believers have used to help organize and guide their thoughts to Him. What about thanksgiving, the ‘T’ part? Did Keith fail at prayer because this part seems to be absent from what he wrote, or are we just overlooking that part, somehow? Perhaps the ‘T’ part is the music-making with which Keith responded, taking a page from the psalmists: I will praise God’s name in song and glorify him with thanksgiving (Psalm 69:30); Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song (Psalm 95:2). Giving back a song to Him who gave it – thanksgiving can indeed be reciprocal with this One we worship.

 

So, what exactly was keeping 27-year-old Keith Green up on a Monday night, a struggle that he had with something that would not allow him to rest? You can listen for yourself, by clicking on the youtube link below, or alternately read here a brief transcription (more or less) of what he says in the first minute of a performance of ‘Oh Lord…’. He says his prayer, beginning about midnight, was like a letter to the Lord. He didn’t know where to mail it, so he put it in his bible instead. And what was in this letter? He asked God to do something about his heart, because a lot of time had passed since he had met the Lord, and his heart was beginning to harden. This condition was becoming too natural, and Keith wanted to have ‘baby skin’ again, on his heart. He could already feel the inevitable advance of age, that he was getting old and wrinkled, with a callousness that had formed. He wasn’t really doing anything wrong, but he was more distressed because of the things he wasn’t doing. So, he stayed up until about 2:00 AM writing the song. The words he wrote in that two-hour span show he felt ‘tired’ (v.2); that his ‘faith (was) small’ (v.3), and that he’d ignored God’s ‘book of books’, and ‘prayer’ (v.3); and that he needed his ‘fire’ to be re-lit (v.4). He repeats in a chorus that he aspired to sharing God’s word, but that he needed ‘first…to just live it’.

 

We could gather from what Keith wrote, as the title words for this song-prayer indicate, that he had discovered God was with him. Keith might have sounded like a faith-struggler, but that did not seem to have diminished his view or desire to reacquaint himself with the God he knew was listening to him. Perhaps Keith had, during the first few moments when he first knew Him, saved this sensation, like keeping a special secret in a bottle. In 1980, it sounds as if Keith remembered this and had called from inside his own spirit for a renewal – like uncorking the bottle and letting the genie-God out to reform his spirit again. Keith’s life journey had not been smooth – from belief and musical success in his early youth, then to drugs and eastern mysticism as a teenager, and finally returning to Christ in the early 1970s – so one can really appreciate Keith’s expression of what he saw. He’d lived on the ‘other side’, one might say, so could that have magnified his gratitude for the God he could re-envision in 1980? Keith tragically died in 1982 in a plane crash with 11 others, two years after he wrote ‘O Lord…’. What might he say to you and me today? He might not recommend for you and me this circuitous route to God that he traveled, but Keith might respond that he was just a little bit like Jacob – a wrestler with God (Genesis 32:22-32). How about you…are you wrestling with Him?

 

 

Hear the author-composer tell the song’s story here, in the first minute of the song’s performance: Keith Green - Oh, Lord You're Beautiful (Live) (youtube.com)

 

Read about the author-composer here: Keith Green - Wikipedia

 

See information here about the map of Texas highlighting Smith County: File:Map of Texas highlighting Smith County.svg - Wikimedia Commons…the copyright holder of the image has stated the following: I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so:I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

My Eyes Are Dry -- Keith Green

He must have been voicing the words of someone he knew who was much older, right? That might be what someone would ask, if they read the words of “My Eyes Are Dry” and knew Keith Green in 1978 in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California (see its seal here). After all, he was just 25, and some of the song’s words include ‘old’. What did he mean by that? Knowing Keith’s personality, you could instead surmise that he was talking about himself. Old doesn’t have to be physical. And how does one become rejuvenated, if the wrinkles on your skin or the tedium of life make you feel worn out? Just looking at Keith’s life – a radical take on the Gospel – would be a solution, albeit incorporating it into one’s life would require the Keith Green energy and personality, a rare commodity.

‘Life is short…make it count.’ That sums up what Keith and his wife Melody Green used for the Last Days Ministries (LDM) they formed just about the time that “My Eyes Are Dry” was gestating in Keith’s imagination. Both he and Melody had come out of the late 60’s-early 70’s generation searching for a genuine spiritual foundation. Their newfound belief in Christianity was so energized, that they readily reached out to house the needy in their neighborhood -- drug addicts, the homeless, prostitutes, unwed mothers, and others tossed aside by the culture. Faith was supposed to be real, and the Greens put it into action. Keith’s concerts reflected the same authenticity that he urged audiences to sing in words as if they were theirs. He must have been contemplating times when he’d felt stale and insensitive, even while knowing God was present. Keith’s method was not to cover up his valleys, but to expose them, confess them, and share with others how Jesus had refreshed his spirit. ‘If you’re in a low place right now, that’s where I once was’, Keith would tell them in so many words during an interlude in “My Eyes Are Dry”. Last Days Ministries– formally established in 1977 --  was fresh proof  that Keith and Melody were advocating this message not just to music fans, but to dozens of people they were lodging in their own home and other dwellings they’d acquired. If you feel dry (empty), old, hard, and cold, God is your oil and wine, according to Keith’s lyrics. He can make your life count again.

In keeping with their ministry’s motto, Keith Green’s life was indeed impactful, although tragically short. LDM is still operating, under Melody’s leadership, following the death of Keith and 11 others who were attempting to take an airborne tour of the LDM campus in 1982. This 28-year episode – Keith Green’s lifespan – is noteworthy, and still speaks of his zeal for Christ through words like those in ‘My Eyes…’. If I went to my eternal home today, have I left evidence of an inner conviction like Keith’s? Maybe I should make certain there’s some external portion to that internal piece, huh?          

See the following websites for information on the composer and the ministry he and his wife established:

http://www.newreleasetoday.com/authordetail.php?aut_id=431

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Green

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vsWO3-we-Y

http://www.lastdaysministries.org/Groups/1000008703/Last_Days_Ministries/Keith_Green/Writings/Writings.aspx

There Is a Redeemer -- Melody Green

A redeemed hippie. That’s what someone might have said about Melody Green in the mid-1970’s. Along with much of the rest of her generation, Melody seemed to effervesce when she had found the truth, magnified by the polar opposite life she had been living. “There is a Redeemer” that she wrote by 1977, including the third verse by her husband Keith, was a pretty simple expression of the Greens’ discovery. That probably explains its wide popularity. Maybe the way the third verse and its writer’s destiny played out just a few years after its composition helps explain the song’s reach too. Some might say Keith Green was being apocalyptic, perhaps even seeing the four horsemen in the Apocalypse (see the picture).

Melody’s path to “There Is a Redeemer” was anything but direct, and even after its composition, there would be unexpected events that gave fresh meaning to its words. She’d grown up in the Jewish faith of her parents and grandparents, the latter of whom were survivors of the persecution in tsarist Russia. Despite her respect for their influence upon her early life, in her teens and early 20’s Melody tried Buddhism in Japan on the heels of experimentation with drugs in California, as she searched for fulfillment and something that could be termed genuine. She met Keith, her husband in 1972, and they mutually sought the faith they felt must be out there, finally grasping it in 1975 during a bible study. In the aftermath of the discovery, Melody and Keith started something that continues today, called Last Days Ministry (LDM), an outreach to the drug culture, to unwed teenage mothers, and to their neighborhood too. It was in the midst of this in 1977 that Melody penned the words to the song that has become so well-known. Its message was straightforward – Jesus is God’s present to the world, and He also left the Spirit to continue what the Son started. Keith wrote the third verse, unknowing that its words would have what some might call an eerie ring to them just a few years hence, a call to imagine the eternal future. In 1982, with their family life, LDM, and Keith’s music career blossoming, a tragic event—a plane crash—snuffed out the life of Keith and two of the Greens’ children.  …Last Days Ministry, ‘life is short, make it count’ the website of this organization the Greens started says. One wonders if that motto buoyed Melody during that heart-rending period in 1982.

LDM is still active today, carried along perhaps by the memory of the song’s truth contained in its final verse. You just never know when your eternity will become fact, perhaps something that Keith Green would tell us if he were here today. Oh, I guess he did say it today after all…it’s in the verse he wrote in 1977. Am I listening to what I’ve been singing…?   

The source for the song story is “The Complete Book of Hymns – Inspiring Stories About 600 Hymns and Praise Songs”, by William J. and Ardythe Petersen, Tyndale House Publishers, 2006.

Also see the following links for biographies of the composer: http://www.newreleasetuesday.com/authordetail.php?aut_id=431

http://www.lastdaysministries.org/Groups/1000008704/Last_Days_Ministries/Melody_Green/Bio/Bio.aspx

Also see the following site for background on a ministry the composer began: http://www.lastdaysministries.org/