Striving For Significance

 In the past couple of weeks or so, I have gotten into watching a favorite Christian comedian I have followed since the early 1990s, Mark Lowry.  Many who are Southern Gospel fans are familiar with Mark from the Gaither Homecoming shows, as in the late 1990s and early 2000s Mark and Gaither had established a hilarious comedy routine with Mark tormenting Gaither about his hair, etc., and it was frankly funny!  In an interview I watched later, Gaither mentioned that Mark had a sort of sanctified Don Rickles shtick he used, and he told Mark that if he had to pick on anyone, then Gaither would be his straight man - it was a formula that worked too.  When asked by people if Gaither got offended at Mark's ribbing, Mark replied, "he gives me a raise everytime I come up with something else!"  The close friendship Bill Gaither and Mark Lowry have had over the years is an amazing story in itself, and the joy the comedy they produced has made people laugh for almost 30 years now.  If I had one criticism of Lowry, it would be the Christmas song he wrote called "Mary Did You Know?" which does have some theological problems in all honesty.  But, Lowry is not a theologian, and nor do I think he claims to be, and a song like that should be taken with a grain of salt and it doesn't deter from the fact that Lowry is still a brilliant comedian and his work never ages. 

There are a couple of routines that I really found to be my favorites of Mark's comedy.  The first I will briefly mention, as it is perhaps one of my all-time favorite videos to watch.  In the clip, Gaither is performing a song composed by legendary Statesmen lead singer Jake Hess () entitled "I'm Gonna Keep On Singing."  At the time, both Mark and Hess were part of the Gaither Vocal Band lineup, and it was a winning formula in all honesty.  Bill is treating the song in the video like a live rehearsal, and he is giving the group instructions about singing the parts.  The first part is the first verse, and Gaither instructs Mark at the halfway point in the verse to insert an "OOOOOO," and upon receiving the instructions Gaither kicks off the song while sitting at the piano with his group behind him.  After the first four words, "It's as old as..." Mark with a silly face goes "OOOOO!"  He is reprimanded by Gaither who tells him that this was supposed to be at the middle of the verse, at which Lowry replies,  "I thought that was halfway through."  Toward the last verse of the song, there is a line about "I hear the little sparrow," and that too becomes a highlight - on queue, Guy Penrod, the other singer in the group, gives a warbling whistle - Gaither then continues the song and the whistle comes again, so it is done over.  At that point, Mark lets out a huge squawk, and Gaither is apparently perturbed (it is an act obviously, but it is funny!) and Mark's response is "Boy, that is a big bird that came through here - it almost landed in your nest!"  Every time I watch that, I am literally laughing so hard that I cannot contain myself.  After Gaither accusingly calls out Mark and Mark vehemently denies it, Mark then points an accusing finger at Jake Hess, and says "He did it!  You can be replaced - I can wear that wig!" and then he pulls out a wig that looks like Hess's hairdo and dons it and begins to imitate Hess's singing style, which gets a huge audience response and a good-natured laugh from Hess, who is about as amusing in that he is cracking up laughing during Penrod's sparrow calls.  In all honesty, I could watch that over and over, as it is just hilarious to watch and it is classic comedy at its finest.  While that is perhaps my favorite routine of Mark's and Gaither's, there is another one that got my attention too. 

There was a clip where the Gaither program was taped live in a major city, and it is close to Mark's birthday.  After an amusing monologue about the "joys" of "turning forty," which Mark says sounds like clabbered milk, he then gets off on a speech in which he says the first fifty years of his life were about success, but for the second fifty he is striving for significance - he then launches into an amusing song called "God Help the USA" which is his fictional run for President (this was taped after the 2000 election, so there are jokes about recounts in the song as well as putting Willy Nelson in charge of the IRS - that was brilliant, as at the time Willy was having a few issues of his own with unjust tax laws enacted under Clinton's administration).  While the song was amusing - especially the part about making Gospel music legend Vestal Goodman his running mate - that line "striving for significance" did hit a chord with me, and I wanted to reflect on that a little.  Despite the amusing comedic setting this was uttered in, there is a grain of wisdom in it too, and recently I related better to it myself.  

It has been almost 6 years since I hit my 50th birthday, and in all honesty what came after I turned 50 was perhaps some of the most challenging times of my life.  Barbara and I divorced, I lost both of my parents, I lost my home, I got a doctoral degree, and I started a new career as a teacher as well as moving to Baltimore.  Things have definitely got a little shaken up after I hit mid-century in my life, and even now I am still making a lot of adjustments to everything.  At 55 now, a lot of that dust is starting to settle thankfully, but I am still in the process of trying to make sense of some of it.  In many ways, like Mark Lowry I have achieved a level of success, but I also struggle with significance.  Am I significant enough, and do I really want to be?  Those are challenging questions to which no answer comes easily.  And, can significance be a thing to strive for, or is it just something bestowed once others notice?  There are people God places in our lives that we impact for sure, but for most of our lives we are not even aware we had that impact on them, and in many cases it is only recognized after we die.  It reminds me of the words of Shakespeare I had to memorize in my senior year of high school many moons ago in Julius Caesar when a monologue states "the evil men do lives after them, but the good is oft interred with their bones."  The truth in that is that often people remember more about what was wrong with you than what you accomplished, and in life that is even more so because even our families at times take us for granted and don't really see the hard work and other efforts we make to achieve our goals in life - I actually had relatives that mocked my doctoral degree, criticized the fact I successfully went to college and got a good education, and they even are dismissive with my other work too.  That is why I have finally come to a conclusion about that, and I will add that now.

I have talked about the fact that at times our families can be toxic, and what is really sad is that since I have moved to Baltimore, I have perhaps as many as twenty relatives living within 15 miles of me, yet I never see them, they don't talk to me, and they frankly don't care I even exist - oh, that is unless I can be useful to them.  When I first moved here as a matter of fact and was looking for a place to live, I wanted to reach out to my cousins about possibly subletting a room or something with them, and they just brushed me off and didn't even respond - the old axiom that "blood is thicker than water" is not applicable with relatives like that, because their blood is about as sterile as water when it comes to how they relate to other family members.  I have another cousin who lives back in my hometown who is a notorious gossip also - never hear much out of him either, but for some reason he likes to run his mouth to other family members about juicy details in my life that are none of his business.  I have found that I have little use for these "relatives," because although we may share a family tree, they don't treat me like family and frankly I am probably better off without them. This is why in recent years I have concluded that perhaps it is time to reshape my family legacy, and as mentioned earlier there are a couple of things I won't divulge at this point that are in the formative stages of doing just that.  While I cannot say a lot about that now, I can say that it will be something that writes a new chapter in our family history, and it will be a different chapter that will look radically different in generations to come while still maintaining the better aspects of my roots.  It sometimes becomes necessary to close an old chapter and then pick up the pen to write a new one, and that is what is happening now, with the past five years compelling me to do so in all honesty.  While this is still in the formative stages and I am not at liberty to say a lot about it yet, I can say that when the time comes to reveal things it will be a shock to many, but also it's a beautiful thing that I am happy with too.  Writing a new chapter in one's life is never an easy thing, and there is some shaking up that happens in the process, but the new chapter will be something much better.  And, that is where significance comes in.

So what does all that have to do with striving for significance?  Over the years, I have had things come a little later to me than they do for many people, and for some reason it is perfect timing.  It must be understood also that significance is seeded by success, but success is not something that has a blanket definition - what some view as a failure may be in reality the greatest success to the person whom it is bestowed upon.  Success is not about financial wealth necessarily either, as it more explicitly has to do with getting to the place one has worked toward in life.  In many ways, I can say I have success, although there is always room for improvement and new goals to achieve.  So, being success is not uniform and there are many forms of success even in our individual lives, what happens when we get there?  That is where significance comes in.  Significance is simply something that really stands out, and it marks a distinction between where you are vs. where someone else is.  What is significant to one person may not be for another, and that is why we don't need to try the "keep up with the Joneses" racket with others.  Their significance is not yours, and yours is not theirs.  And neither form of significance is negative - we achieve it for ourselves and can be satisfied to a degree, but we also should celebrate it when others achieve significance.  It is not a competition or race, as the life course we each walk upon has different rules tailored to our specific goals, individuality, etc.  This is why we don't strive to imitate others, because we have a unique vocation in life that sets us on a different course, and we need to follow that to achieve our own particular success.  Again, our measure of success is not necessarily relevant to anyone else, as there is no uniform rule for success.  This is why too in our overly-consumerized culture we perhaps have lost our way.  We look at movie stars whose images are as shallow as a puddle of puppy urine, and society dictates that we have to look a certain way, think a certain thought, or buy a certain product to achieve their definition of "success."  The only ones who get successful from that in all honesty are greedy corporate entities who profit from our collective insecurities about ourselves, and to be honest it is so convoluted that even if a turnaround happened in society now, it would take decades (if not centuries!) to untangle the mess it has caused.  While others can inspire us and motivate us, we should not emulate them - we are our own persons, and what we are supposed to do is not necessarily the same as them. Until that sinks in, we will continue to have an unbalanced society. 

Any rate, the point is to strive for significance, and to have an awareness of our own model of success instead of trying to play "monkey see monkey do" with others.  If we do that, we may be more fulfilled.  Thanks again for allowing me to share, and will see you next time.