Land of My Sojourn

 

A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band ends the way it began...with Rich Mullins contemplating his earthly existence, God's sovereignty over it, and mankind's need for redemption.

And the coal trucks come a-runnin'

With their bellies full of coal

And their big wheels a-hummin'

Down this road that lies open like the soul of a woman

Who hid the spies who were lookin'

For the land of the milk and the honey

And this road she is a woman

She was made from a rib

Cut from the sides of these mountains

Oh these great sleeping Adams

Who are lonely even here in paradise

Lonely for somebody to kiss them

and I'll sing my song, and I'll sing my song

In the land of my sojourn

And the lady in the harbor

She still holds her torch out

To those huddled masses who are

Yearning for a freedom that still eludes them

The immigrant's children see their brightest dreams shattered

Here on the New Jersey shoreline in the

Greed and the glitter of those high-tech casinos

But some mendicants wander off into a cathedral

And they stoop in the silence

And there their prayers are still whispered

And I'll sing their song, and I'll sing their song

In the land of my sojourn

Nobody tells you when you get born here

How much you'll come to love it

And how you'll never belong here

So I call you my country

And I'll be lonely for my home

And I wish that I could take you there with me

And down the brown brick spine of some dirty blind alley

All those drain pipes are drippin' out the last Sons Of Thunder

While off in the distance the smoke stacks

Were belching back this city's best answer

And the countryside was pocked

With all of those Mail Pouch^© posters

Thrown up on the rotting sideboards of

These rundown stables like the one that Christ was born in

When the old world started dying

And the new world started coming on

And I'll sing His song, and I'll sing His song

In the land of my sojourn

1993 - Edward Grant, Inc.
1993 - Kid Brothers of St. Frank Publishing

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Truth is..."I call you my country and I'll be lonely for my home and I wish that I could take you there with me" applies not just to living in America but to occupying Planet Earth. As Paul says in the New Living Translation of Romans 8:22 and 23, "We know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us."