I’m not religious but there is something about Gospel music that just moves your soul and forces you to feel all those feelings you shoved down deep in your soul. Thanks for sharing!
This is great stuff. It reminds me of one of the great U2 moments, when they collaborated with a Harlem Gospel choir. (U2, of course, has been Christian the whole time, but undercover about it. Bono has given some very charming interviews about Jesus.)
I also grew up Southern Baptist and hated most of what I heard on CCM radio (the only radio we listened to), but I had the benefit of growing up at a time when the internet could pipe in excellent alternative CCM--which does exist. The Rich Mullins songs on the airwaves were the boring stuff - Awesome God - but off to the side he was doing an adaptation of the Apostles' Creed on hammered dulcimer or lyrical Americana ballads. (Rich was a lovable weirdo, of course, who'd turn up to churches in the 90s, cigarette-scratchy voice, brown as a nut, long-haired, and sans shoes, and would ramble out these touching and unpredictable openers to his songs.)
"Well the moon moved past Nebraska
And spilled laughter on them cold Dakota Hills
And angels danced on Jacob's stairs
Yeah they danced on Jacob's stairs
There is this silence in the Badlands
And over Kansas the whole universe was stilled"
Michael Card was too prosey in his lyrics to be a great poet, but he also did a lengthy suite of songs about the book of Job, another song about how Jesus must have seemed insane ("God's Own Fool"), a song about Hosea from Gomer's perspective, and was constantly weaving threads of the new and old Testaments into his music in such a way that I feel I learned most of my theology from him (he did an excellent lecture on why lament is a lost art in modern Christian music--though, as I think he noted, that's not true of the black American church: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr3mNGtxd-I)
"Oh the fiery suns above us
In the vast veil of the sky
Are your servant flames of fire
Are your silent holy guides"
Anyway, thanks for indulging a long comment. I plan to look up most of the songs in the excellent piece above.
Michael Card! Blast from my youth-group past. An interesting lecture, thanks. My favorite "Awesome God" moment? This, from Righteous Gemstones, even if it's in Mandarin:
All roads lead back to The Band. I love those guys. Manuel looked like he just wasn’t going to last long in this world when you watched him in the Last Waltz. Danko is my favorite. He just seems like a kid having a good time. Always brings great energy to their performances. He is so freaking high in that video clip!
Ah, the bumblebee metal of Stryper...crazy times, those '80s. When I was a very little boy, church groups tried burning piles of Iron Maiden's classic album "The Number of the Beast," until they found that burning them brought forth toxic smoke. They just piled them up and smashed them with hammers instead.
And it's funny, because since then, a number of prominent metal musicians have converted--or returned to--Christianity: Alice Cooper, the two founders of Megadeth, Nicko McBrain of Iron Maiden, Blackie Lawless, to name a few.
I love that you posted an old piece Matt. It's a great read. And congrats on your son heading into ministry. I got a seminary degree a number of years ago, and while I'm not in full-time ministry (why do that when I can torture myself in academia?), I still do use it quite a bit with some teaching and a little bit of preaching on the side too. Good for him.
I heard an unusual Gospel song in 1956 by the talented “Soul Stirrers”on WAMO in Pittsburgh. This was singer was a member of the group who had an unusual voice singing style.The song was “Wonderful”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjtcOh4hmyE I loved this guy’s voice and no one has matched it since then as far as I am concerned. Sometime later I heard him singing a popular hit song on another radio station. That beautiful voice was none other than Sam Cooke. He had move to popular music to sing “You Send Me.” released in 19597 and sold a million copies. He wasn’t the first gospel singer who moved to the main stream pop music.
Another oldie but goodie (hopefully not already covered in the comments and replies):
Q-How do you keep your Baptist friend from drinking all your beer on a fishing trip?
A- Invite a second Baptist friend.
My wife and I were both raised SB, although she had extra rank by also being the daughter of a Gideon. She has often remarked on the disconnect between the unrelenting focus on the dangers of the devil's water, while gluttony got a pass, so as not to interfere with the ice cream buffet that was the headliner for the Sunday night fellowship meeting.
"As I mentioned in a piece a while back, my oldest son, Luke, is studying to join the ministry – not typically the most lucrative vocation... But at least he didn’t become an intersectional dance major, exploring the liminal space between movement and gender oppression."
So not studying for Episcopal ministry, then?
Confession: My misspent youth involved liturgical dance. Not much, and not liminal, so far as I know. Also, our current church is Episcopal, and it is glorious, both in weirdness and in music. I grew up on Purcell's "Hear my prayer" and Howells' "Like as the hart" thanks to a choir director at a community church who'd been steeped in the Anglican choral tradition:
But Matt's selection reminds me of the many variations on the spiritual "Satan, your kingdom must come down"/"Satan, we're gonna tear your kingdom down". You can find recordings of it by Frank Proffitt, Sister Fleeta Mitchell and Rev Willie Mae Eberhard, Willie Nelson, Robert Plant, Uncle Tupelo, and others on YouTube, but my two favorite so far are by Shirley Caesar and by the Montreal band "Beast":
About 2/3 through, Shirley begins reminiscing about the clay hills of Carolina and a little church there that didn't even have a piano, just drums, and incidentally, she'd like "to remind Satan one more time his time is just about out."
Beast's album apparently belongs to the genre of trip hop, something I wouldn't have suspected I could like if I hadn't heard it first. ("Trip hop? Could you play some Anton Bruckner instead?") I'm still not sure if I like have a quacky contralto with a French accent shout rapid-fire rhymes at me in the midst of a song, but the rhymes (so far as I can make out the words) are somewhat witty, the instrumentation is engagingly weird, and I find the James-Bond-y ending surprisingly uplifting.
Lastly, this rendition of "Nothing but the blood of Jesus" isn't famous or polished, but still my favorite:
(OK, lastly for real this time, someone shared this rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem with me, with subtitles in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=einTXaSeGAI )
To me I guess it represents a subtle call to grace against all that would divide us. Or maybe just an acknowledgement of helplessness in the face of existential dread.
I didn't include the final verse. A coda of hope. God willing.
Thanks for giving me a bunch of music to dig into.
Your prefatory on SB life hits very close to home. Contemporary Christian music gives me hives, so I found a unicorn SBC church in metro ATL that has hymn books.
An Episcopalian friend jabbed at me once by saying, “Methodists are Baptists who can read.”
“No,” I said. “The difference between Baptists & Methodists is that Methodists will greet each other in the liquor store.”
Ha! A lifetime ago I was a small-town Methodist, and try as I might, I can't recall running into other M's when I was in any of the several liquor stores around town. Think they bought their beer and wine at the grocery. Not sure where they went for their hooch. Probably used one of the drive-up windows at most of the several, ahem, top-shelf establishments I frequented, since most of them in that small southern town also doubled as bars, nearly all of which were notorious for playing fast and loose with the "liquor laws" since my hometown was in one of only a handful of "wet" counties in a state that had 120 counties all in. Ran into a few of their offspring of my age (read not exactly legal) in a few of those establishments, though.
If Baptists could get wine in MOST grocery stores in the South, the joke wouldn’t work.
Fun fact:
My granddaddy was the classic “bi-vocational” Southern Baptist preacher. Seminary? What’s that?
He also liked his beer, and had to drive a county (or two) over to get it. Until my freshman year of college, when I had to linger in South Alabama for a summer to get my in-state tuition.
Love the line about the joke not working. Since we're having fun with this denominational thing, here's a bit of a fun story, absolutely true.
As noted, I grew up in the Methodist church, but have a good bit of experience with a couple of other denominations, Baptists among them. Our next-door neighbors were Baptists, of what was referred to politely at the time as the "hard-shelled" variety. No drinkin', no smokin', no gamblin', no cussin', no fun, according to some folks. But that certainly wasn't true. The fun part, I mean. They were great people, and close, lifelong friends with my mother and father, despite the fact that my father was a very lapsed Catholic, only darkened the door of the Methodist church with my mother and me at Christmas and occasionally Easter, worked for Schenley Distilleries for years, and not only enjoyed a cold beer on a hot day while sitting bare chested on the back patio in full view of Mrs. Baptist's kitchen window - a practice I know she frowned on somewhat - but he also had an affinity for a well-made Highball several times a week, a fact also known to these teetotaling good neighbors. Mr. Baptist and my dad loved to play ping pong, and spent many a summer Friday night in cut-throat matches lasting into the wee hours under a small set of floodlights in our back yard, my father downing a beer or two or maybe a Highball along the way, a practice Mrs. Baptist didn't really care for either, but never gainsayed in any significant way.
When I was still a young kid, Mrs. Baptist ended up in the local emergency room, and it was soon determined that she needed emergency surgery for internal bleeding. She had not a rare but a somewhat uncommon blood type, a type that my father also had, a fact that they had known about each other for years. None of that exact type was immediately available, the closest being a couple of hours away. When Mr. Baptist called my dad, he was at the hospital like a rifle shot, and ponied up 2 pints of the needed liquid, leaving him more than a little wrung out for a day or so. The surgery proceeded and all turned out well.
When my parents and I went to visit Mrs. Baptist in her hospital room a couple of days after the surgery, she thanked my father very warmly for having donated his blood for her. Her husband sincerely echoed the sentiment. My dad asked her how she was feeling, and she replied that she felt quite well, really, all things considered, and that she'd likely be home the following day, if not that evening.
My father, a first generation Italian transplant from Philly, and not one to shun an opportunity for a little wry humor, chuckled and said that she could thank those couple of pints of 90 proof Dago Red runnin' around in her veins for her speedy recovery and current feeling of well-being. He noted he would probably need to down an extra Highball or two before the week was up in order to make up for his loss.
The look on Mrs. Baptist's face was absolutely priceless. She seemed like she wanted to say something, but simply couldn't. My mother was positively aghast. A moment later, Mr. Baptist, who had been quietly standing by the bed as my dad and his wife spoke, absolutely cracked up, which led to all of us hee hawing, which I think was about as good a medicine as could be had at that moment.
Man, your granddad's impressive. The Southern Baptist preachers I knew growing up would've been tarred and feathered if a beer so much as touched their lips. Of course, I know a lot of preachers now who make excellent drinking companions. It's convenient. You can start talking God before you get drunk, instead of having to wait until after, like with most people.
Gas @ $4.09 here at the moment, about what I pay for a six-pack of my brand of suds. Glad I'm only punching the clock part-time these days. Get much better fuel economy opening the door of my fridge than getting behind the wheel of my ride.
OK. I believe you've referred to yourself as a Lukewarm Christian. Fair enough. I see myself in much the same way. But I didn't sense a single drop of tepidness in your homage to what sounds like a marvelous tribute in its own right to the men and women "who left the next best part of themselves on scratchy vinyl". You noted that it was "a documentation of their struggles". So, I guess it's of no real surprise to me that you'd stand them up in well-deserved praise here. After all, I seem to recall your words from a certain Slack Tide from near the jump on your new enterprise: "Maybe we're never done with struggle. We are, after all, human. But, that's okay. The human strugglers are welcome here."
Thanks again for the welcome. Nice to know you're a man of your word.
I’m not religious but there is something about Gospel music that just moves your soul and forces you to feel all those feelings you shoved down deep in your soul. Thanks for sharing!
This is great stuff. It reminds me of one of the great U2 moments, when they collaborated with a Harlem Gospel choir. (U2, of course, has been Christian the whole time, but undercover about it. Bono has given some very charming interviews about Jesus.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Wt3dhF4fU
I also grew up Southern Baptist and hated most of what I heard on CCM radio (the only radio we listened to), but I had the benefit of growing up at a time when the internet could pipe in excellent alternative CCM--which does exist. The Rich Mullins songs on the airwaves were the boring stuff - Awesome God - but off to the side he was doing an adaptation of the Apostles' Creed on hammered dulcimer or lyrical Americana ballads. (Rich was a lovable weirdo, of course, who'd turn up to churches in the 90s, cigarette-scratchy voice, brown as a nut, long-haired, and sans shoes, and would ramble out these touching and unpredictable openers to his songs.)
"Well the moon moved past Nebraska
And spilled laughter on them cold Dakota Hills
And angels danced on Jacob's stairs
Yeah they danced on Jacob's stairs
There is this silence in the Badlands
And over Kansas the whole universe was stilled"
Michael Card was too prosey in his lyrics to be a great poet, but he also did a lengthy suite of songs about the book of Job, another song about how Jesus must have seemed insane ("God's Own Fool"), a song about Hosea from Gomer's perspective, and was constantly weaving threads of the new and old Testaments into his music in such a way that I feel I learned most of my theology from him (he did an excellent lecture on why lament is a lost art in modern Christian music--though, as I think he noted, that's not true of the black American church: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr3mNGtxd-I)
"Oh the fiery suns above us
In the vast veil of the sky
Are your servant flames of fire
Are your silent holy guides"
Anyway, thanks for indulging a long comment. I plan to look up most of the songs in the excellent piece above.
Michael Card! Blast from my youth-group past. An interesting lecture, thanks. My favorite "Awesome God" moment? This, from Righteous Gemstones, even if it's in Mandarin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq3IGAHbh0U
All roads lead back to The Band. I love those guys. Manuel looked like he just wasn’t going to last long in this world when you watched him in the Last Waltz. Danko is my favorite. He just seems like a kid having a good time. Always brings great energy to their performances. He is so freaking high in that video clip!
You dug into the archives, great job!
Ah, the bumblebee metal of Stryper...crazy times, those '80s. When I was a very little boy, church groups tried burning piles of Iron Maiden's classic album "The Number of the Beast," until they found that burning them brought forth toxic smoke. They just piled them up and smashed them with hammers instead.
And it's funny, because since then, a number of prominent metal musicians have converted--or returned to--Christianity: Alice Cooper, the two founders of Megadeth, Nicko McBrain of Iron Maiden, Blackie Lawless, to name a few.
I love that you posted an old piece Matt. It's a great read. And congrats on your son heading into ministry. I got a seminary degree a number of years ago, and while I'm not in full-time ministry (why do that when I can torture myself in academia?), I still do use it quite a bit with some teaching and a little bit of preaching on the side too. Good for him.
Thanks!
Aargh! I had my (digital) wallet out and was ready to buy: Physical sets out of stock.
Abebooks has it used, for about 120 bucks. Though no idea what condition it's in.
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31072480069&cm_mmc=ggl-_-COM_Shopp_Rare_noclick30-_-product_id=bi%3A%2031072480069-_-keyword=&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_pmGz9W29gIVHm1vBB2qVQEpEAQYASABEgK72_D_BwE
I heard an unusual Gospel song in 1956 by the talented “Soul Stirrers”on WAMO in Pittsburgh. This was singer was a member of the group who had an unusual voice singing style.The song was “Wonderful”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjtcOh4hmyE I loved this guy’s voice and no one has matched it since then as far as I am concerned. Sometime later I heard him singing a popular hit song on another radio station. That beautiful voice was none other than Sam Cooke. He had move to popular music to sing “You Send Me.” released in 19597 and sold a million copies. He wasn’t the first gospel singer who moved to the main stream pop music.
Another oldie but goodie (hopefully not already covered in the comments and replies):
Q-How do you keep your Baptist friend from drinking all your beer on a fishing trip?
A- Invite a second Baptist friend.
My wife and I were both raised SB, although she had extra rank by also being the daughter of a Gideon. She has often remarked on the disconnect between the unrelenting focus on the dangers of the devil's water, while gluttony got a pass, so as not to interfere with the ice cream buffet that was the headliner for the Sunday night fellowship meeting.
By golly, you never let me down! This was a real education (raised Catholic, ran away a long, long time ago). Thank you for this real treat.
I read and listened yesterday am, then spent three hours kayaking through creeks and marshes by the Folly River. Felt of a piece.
how beautiful
"As I mentioned in a piece a while back, my oldest son, Luke, is studying to join the ministry – not typically the most lucrative vocation... But at least he didn’t become an intersectional dance major, exploring the liminal space between movement and gender oppression."
So not studying for Episcopal ministry, then?
Confession: My misspent youth involved liturgical dance. Not much, and not liminal, so far as I know. Also, our current church is Episcopal, and it is glorious, both in weirdness and in music. I grew up on Purcell's "Hear my prayer" and Howells' "Like as the hart" thanks to a choir director at a community church who'd been steeped in the Anglican choral tradition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyieyUw3GXk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwV_LLTn9HY
But Matt's selection reminds me of the many variations on the spiritual "Satan, your kingdom must come down"/"Satan, we're gonna tear your kingdom down". You can find recordings of it by Frank Proffitt, Sister Fleeta Mitchell and Rev Willie Mae Eberhard, Willie Nelson, Robert Plant, Uncle Tupelo, and others on YouTube, but my two favorite so far are by Shirley Caesar and by the Montreal band "Beast":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5MeA68YSK0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHiMogZErCA
About 2/3 through, Shirley begins reminiscing about the clay hills of Carolina and a little church there that didn't even have a piano, just drums, and incidentally, she'd like "to remind Satan one more time his time is just about out."
Beast's album apparently belongs to the genre of trip hop, something I wouldn't have suspected I could like if I hadn't heard it first. ("Trip hop? Could you play some Anton Bruckner instead?") I'm still not sure if I like have a quacky contralto with a French accent shout rapid-fire rhymes at me in the midst of a song, but the rhymes (so far as I can make out the words) are somewhat witty, the instrumentation is engagingly weird, and I find the James-Bond-y ending surprisingly uplifting.
Lastly, this rendition of "Nothing but the blood of Jesus" isn't famous or polished, but still my favorite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfcZQhvijcA
(OK, lastly for real this time, someone shared this rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem with me, with subtitles in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=einTXaSeGAI )
Thank you so much for all the beauty you shared with us here. I will explore it.
I am overwhelmed by the power and courage of the Ukrainian national anthem.
I'm so grateful to receive and experience
their treasured song.
Some keeper stuff here. Thanks, Midge.
My Catholic hymns were frequently in Latin. They never made it to anyone's Top Ten. Unless you count 'Kyrie' by Mister Mister. Meh
Kyrie https://g.co/kgs/bgcrg2
My favorite hymn:
If you smile at me I will understand
'Cause that is something
Everybody everywhere does in the same language
I can see by your coat, my friend you're from the other side
There's just one thing I got to know
Can you tell me please who won?
Say can I have some of your purple berries?
Yes, I've been eating them
For six or seven weeks now haven't got sick once
Probably keep us both alive
Horror grips us as we watch you die.
All we can do is echo your anguished cries.
Stare as all human feeling dies.
We are leaving. You don't need us.
Holy and hurting and angry. I guess that's a conversation with Someone at a higher level.
😎 honestly didn't think of that one but... maybe.
To me I guess it represents a subtle call to grace against all that would divide us. Or maybe just an acknowledgement of helplessness in the face of existential dread.
I didn't include the final verse. A coda of hope. God willing.
I grew up southern Baptist.....you are right on. I remember all those songs ❤
Thanks for giving me a bunch of music to dig into.
Your prefatory on SB life hits very close to home. Contemporary Christian music gives me hives, so I found a unicorn SBC church in metro ATL that has hymn books.
An Episcopalian friend jabbed at me once by saying, “Methodists are Baptists who can read.”
“No,” I said. “The difference between Baptists & Methodists is that Methodists will greet each other in the liquor store.”
Unless they're Free Methodists, who are the teetotalers (or were originally)!
Now that's funny.
Ha! A lifetime ago I was a small-town Methodist, and try as I might, I can't recall running into other M's when I was in any of the several liquor stores around town. Think they bought their beer and wine at the grocery. Not sure where they went for their hooch. Probably used one of the drive-up windows at most of the several, ahem, top-shelf establishments I frequented, since most of them in that small southern town also doubled as bars, nearly all of which were notorious for playing fast and loose with the "liquor laws" since my hometown was in one of only a handful of "wet" counties in a state that had 120 counties all in. Ran into a few of their offspring of my age (read not exactly legal) in a few of those establishments, though.
If Baptists could get wine in MOST grocery stores in the South, the joke wouldn’t work.
Fun fact:
My granddaddy was the classic “bi-vocational” Southern Baptist preacher. Seminary? What’s that?
He also liked his beer, and had to drive a county (or two) over to get it. Until my freshman year of college, when I had to linger in South Alabama for a summer to get my in-state tuition.
The preacher & I worked out a deal.
Love the line about the joke not working. Since we're having fun with this denominational thing, here's a bit of a fun story, absolutely true.
As noted, I grew up in the Methodist church, but have a good bit of experience with a couple of other denominations, Baptists among them. Our next-door neighbors were Baptists, of what was referred to politely at the time as the "hard-shelled" variety. No drinkin', no smokin', no gamblin', no cussin', no fun, according to some folks. But that certainly wasn't true. The fun part, I mean. They were great people, and close, lifelong friends with my mother and father, despite the fact that my father was a very lapsed Catholic, only darkened the door of the Methodist church with my mother and me at Christmas and occasionally Easter, worked for Schenley Distilleries for years, and not only enjoyed a cold beer on a hot day while sitting bare chested on the back patio in full view of Mrs. Baptist's kitchen window - a practice I know she frowned on somewhat - but he also had an affinity for a well-made Highball several times a week, a fact also known to these teetotaling good neighbors. Mr. Baptist and my dad loved to play ping pong, and spent many a summer Friday night in cut-throat matches lasting into the wee hours under a small set of floodlights in our back yard, my father downing a beer or two or maybe a Highball along the way, a practice Mrs. Baptist didn't really care for either, but never gainsayed in any significant way.
When I was still a young kid, Mrs. Baptist ended up in the local emergency room, and it was soon determined that she needed emergency surgery for internal bleeding. She had not a rare but a somewhat uncommon blood type, a type that my father also had, a fact that they had known about each other for years. None of that exact type was immediately available, the closest being a couple of hours away. When Mr. Baptist called my dad, he was at the hospital like a rifle shot, and ponied up 2 pints of the needed liquid, leaving him more than a little wrung out for a day or so. The surgery proceeded and all turned out well.
When my parents and I went to visit Mrs. Baptist in her hospital room a couple of days after the surgery, she thanked my father very warmly for having donated his blood for her. Her husband sincerely echoed the sentiment. My dad asked her how she was feeling, and she replied that she felt quite well, really, all things considered, and that she'd likely be home the following day, if not that evening.
My father, a first generation Italian transplant from Philly, and not one to shun an opportunity for a little wry humor, chuckled and said that she could thank those couple of pints of 90 proof Dago Red runnin' around in her veins for her speedy recovery and current feeling of well-being. He noted he would probably need to down an extra Highball or two before the week was up in order to make up for his loss.
The look on Mrs. Baptist's face was absolutely priceless. She seemed like she wanted to say something, but simply couldn't. My mother was positively aghast. A moment later, Mr. Baptist, who had been quietly standing by the bed as my dad and his wife spoke, absolutely cracked up, which led to all of us hee hawing, which I think was about as good a medicine as could be had at that moment.
Baptists don’t have sex standing up because it could lead to dancing.
My best Methodist buddy called us the “Water into Welch’s crowd,” and I thought that was the funniest bit of all.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
it COULD lead to dancing. We need an edit button, Matt.
Man, your granddad's impressive. The Southern Baptist preachers I knew growing up would've been tarred and feathered if a beer so much as touched their lips. Of course, I know a lot of preachers now who make excellent drinking companions. It's convenient. You can start talking God before you get drunk, instead of having to wait until after, like with most people.
Nobody knew about it. His great victory was having a handy, of-age grandson. He spent way less on gas in the summer of ‘85, I promise.
I just looked it up. The average price was $1.12 a gallon. Sigh........
Gas @ $4.09 here at the moment, about what I pay for a six-pack of my brand of suds. Glad I'm only punching the clock part-time these days. Get much better fuel economy opening the door of my fridge than getting behind the wheel of my ride.
OK. I believe you've referred to yourself as a Lukewarm Christian. Fair enough. I see myself in much the same way. But I didn't sense a single drop of tepidness in your homage to what sounds like a marvelous tribute in its own right to the men and women "who left the next best part of themselves on scratchy vinyl". You noted that it was "a documentation of their struggles". So, I guess it's of no real surprise to me that you'd stand them up in well-deserved praise here. After all, I seem to recall your words from a certain Slack Tide from near the jump on your new enterprise: "Maybe we're never done with struggle. We are, after all, human. But, that's okay. The human strugglers are welcome here."
Thanks again for the welcome. Nice to know you're a man of your word.
Thanks, pal.