(DGDGBD)

I wrote this many years ago but Danielle has never let me bury it, either for good or for long. Though I tried to shrug off her annual requests to play it for some adult leaders in honor of their teenage friends who attend a week of Young Life camp, she still managed to sweet-talk me into playing it year in and year out, even though it was, at best, incomplete. I try to include at least one song on each of my albums as a personal bow to Danielle. After all, she is the one who allows me to continue forth in these writing-recording-touring endeavours. The song title is taken from an E.E. Cummings poem by the same name.

One of the most powerful pictures of God’s restorative grace, this side of heaven, is that of the daily miracle of adoption. Though I am not, in a physical sense, adopted, I do empathize with the commonality of the adopted and restored human heart. We are those ransomed sons and daughters who, thank God, have, at long last, one in whom the entitlement as “father” is entirely justified, and one whose propensity for skipping town or negligent abandonment is simply a card that does not exist in His solemn, oath-filled deck.

please, sir, take these children
both are crippled and both lame
the girls’ hands are useless
the boy doesn’t know his name

I am of no relation
though of human bond
the girl was found trembling
and he so poorly shod

I know of no ancestors
just winnowing fork and seed
yet you who lift the helpless
brings the proud to their knees

if you could hear the cries of a helpless angel voice
if you could only see their joy

I want to see them healthy
I want for them to live
but of what I have to offer them
only you can give

with a carpetbag of provisions
I sent them to your door
I beg you, sir, please take them in
as I am old and poor

if you could hear the cries of a helpless angel voice
if you could only see their joy