Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.

• John 8:2-6

The Lord said to me, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.”
So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley. Then I told her, “You are to live with me many days; you must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will behave the same way toward you.”
For the Israelites will live many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred stones, without ephod or household gods. Afterward the Israelites will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king. They will come trembling to the Lord and to his blessings in the last days.

• Hosea 3:1-5

“I wanna be around to pick up the pieces
When somebody breaks your heart
Some somebody twice as smart as I

[Verse 2]
A somebody who will swear to be true
Like you used to do with me
Who’ll leave you to learn
That misery loves company, wait and see

[Verse 3]
I wanna be there to see how he does it
When he breaks your heart to bits
Let’s see if the puzzle fits so fine

[Chorus]
And that’s when I’ll discover that revenge is sweet
As I sit there applaudin’ from a front-row seat
When somebody breaks your heart
Like you broke mine.”

• Johnny Mercer and Sadie Vimmerstedt, I Wanna be Around

I’ll be around
No matter how
You treat me now
I’ll be around from now on

Your latest love
Can never last
And when its past
I’ll be around when he’s gone

Goodbye again
And if you find a love like mine
Just now and then
Drop a line to say you’re feeling fine

And when things go wrong
Perhaps you’ll see
You’re meant for me
So I’ll be around when he’s gone

Goodbye again

Now and then, drop a line
To say that you’re feeling fine

And when things go wrong
Perhaps you’ll see
You’re meant for me
So I’ll be around when he’s gone.”

• Alec Wilder, I’ll Be Around

I seriously doubt if these songs could be salvaged to be worship songs, but the second illustrates God’s love for us.  Substitute whatever pronoun is right for the situation, but the “she” is the sin in our life.

But these two songs take infidelity and being cheated upon in total different directions.  The Mercer song seeks revenge while the Wilder song speaks of forgiveness and love that will never die.

Each of the songs has an interesting backstory.  For I Wanna be Around, a middle-aged beautician from Youngstown, Ohio was intrigued by Frank Sinatra’s divorce of his wife Nancy in 1951.  Sinatra chased after Ava Gardner, married her that same year, and then they divorced six years later.  At that point, widow Sadie Vimmerstedt wrote a line for a song “I want to be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart.”  She wrote the gist of the rest of the song.  She thought of Nancy Barbato Sinatra, divorced with three children, and she projected how she would react.  Sadie mailed her idea to “Johnny Mercer, song writer, New York, NY.”

I have to stop the story here.  Would that letter ever reach its destination today?!  We are supposedly in the information age, but with no better address than that, it would have been tossed in the trash.  But now to finish the story.

The New York post office was not sure which Johnny Mercer was the songwriter, so they sent the letter to ASCAP, American Society of Composers, Authors, and Producers.  As fate would have it, Johnny Mercer was a member, and they forwarded the letter to him.  He made a deal that Sadie would get one third of the royalties, royalties administered by ASCAP.  Tony Bennett’s stayed on the Billboard charts for fourteen weeks in 1963, and many of the singers of that day recorded the song, even Frank Sinatra (what irony).

As for I’ll be Around, Alec Wilder wrote the words while in a taxi in Baltimore, Maryland.  When he cleaned out his pockets, he crumpled and threw away an envelope, but he caught the title of his song.  There was a piano nearby, so he stretched out the crumpled envelope and wrote the song.  This was in 1942, and the first to record it was Cab Calloway.  Again, many artists recorded it, but I love the Cleo Laine version.  When she hits the last note with “gone”, it seems that a gong is adding emphasis, just in the way she sings it.

But to my spiritual point, God tells us to forgive, or we will not be forgiven.  But if you have ever been jilted, left to try to explain what went wrong in a relationship, then you have probably thought it.  At times, we want revenge.  We latch onto the imprecatory verses in the psalms and lustily sing them, but that is not what God wants.  He wants us to love, even love our enemies.  And if there was no love there on our part, it would not hurt so much.

But what of God’s love for us?  He is long-suffering.  He sees our sin, and once we accept Him into our hearts, He sees it no more.  But we still stumble.  We allow some type of “she” into our lives, some sin that God could easily deal with, but we get complaisant, apathetic, too comfortable with the sin that might linger.

And God still loves us.  He might just be saying, “I’ll be around when ‘she’s’ gone.”

We should repent.  God wants us on the right path.  We suffer less while on the right path.  We are a more effective witness to others of God’s Love.  But God is faithful, even when we are not.

And God’s example can be our reaction to the indiscretions of others.  We can stay around and be there when our friend has taken a wrong turn – not to condone their present behavior – but to show love for them, forgiveness, and help them clean up afterwards, once they have returned to their senses.

Here is Tony Bennett singing I Wanna Be Around.

Here is Cleo Laine singing I’ll Be Around.

Both songs talk about being around.  Revenge is a weakness, it wishes to be around.  But love and forgiveness are faithful.  They are different.  There is certainty there.  They will be around.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.