Good morning from the Tilton Inn in Tilton, New Hampshire. Chandler and I are staying in a hotel in the center of this quaint New England town that is easily a couple hundred years old. The floors are crooked, the pipes sing and there’s supposed to be a ghost wandering around, although we had a relatively quiet night. (I prayed over the room. The only ghost we know of here is a holy one.

Last night, on a hillside with 10,000 people, we heard and saw the Newsboys, a Christian pop/rock group from Austrailia (with a lead singer from D.C.) and a performance that would rival anything Chandler is used to hearing on the radio. It was hard hitting and clear about the love of God and the hope of salvation. It made me proud of the Christian music phenomenon I helped birth over forty years ago.

And then we went to a much smaller stage where some aged rockers – a couple of them who were on the scene with me forty years ago – singing some tender, beautiful ballads about life and love, pain and loss, in a style of music hard to categorize as anything other than art, and I felt equally proud that these people would create what they do, lovingly present it, and that my friends sponsoring this event would provide them a venue such as this and make their creative offerings available to a small but appreciative audience who were obviously enjoying the moment as if it were necessary to pinch themselves to make sure it was really happening.

And in a few moments, I will drive over there and lead a seminar on how true love transforms the way we look at sinners and this is what I will tell them:

I used to think that I was right
A lonely candle in the night
And while the heart of the world was breaking
I could not feel the aching
The mantle had passed down to me
This thing was my destiny
But while the world was out there dying
I was in here lying to myself

For all the knowledge I had gained
Had put me on a higher plain
And I became another
No one was my brother
And the loving message He brought down
Turned into a hollow sound
And then I heard Him calling
And His words sent me falling to my knees

You’re not the only one with truth
You’re not the only one with lies
You’re not the only one – the only one who cries
You’re not the only one

And suddenly there was with me
An ocean of humanity
A sea of many faces
In waves of warm embraces
And while I questioned how to judge them all
Who would rise, and who would fall
I found myself among them
And it mattered little who was wrong or right

And then I saw Him lifted up
The wounded one who drank the cup
Of death for all the dying
The end of justifying
And I laid my mantle on the ground
And felt the rain come pouring down
The rain of my religion
Falling down like weeping from the sky

You’re not the only one with truth
You’re not the only one with lies
You’re not the only one – the only one who cries
You’re not the only one
from “Not the Only One” by John Fischer