First off, congrats to the Dallas Mavericks. After what's been a pretty fun NBA Finals, they beat Miami on the Heat's home floor tonight to win the title in 6 games. Many of you know I was rooting for Dallas, not because I like them or anything like that, but because I really dislike the Heat. So thank you for providing a very entertaining series and coming out on top.
Now, on to the point of this post. This is going to seem really random, or maybe funny depending on who you are, but this post is based around one Bible passage, two songs, and how they distracted me during church today. Deuteronomy 34 is a pretty cool passage. It's where Moses gets taken to the top of the Mountain and first sees The Promised Land. God tells him he himself will never get to cross over into it, but that his descendants will. Moses then dies, and the scripture leads us to believe that God himself buried Moses in the plains of Moab. Now, the name of the mountain that Moses ascends to view The Promised Land is, depending on the translation/translator, either Mount Pisgah or Mount Nebo. For my purposes here, we're going to stick with Pisgah. Now this isn't some theology lesson or anything like that, so just hang with me here.
During church today, we sang "Sweet Hour Of Prayer". It's an old hymn and a good one. The last verse of that hymn refers to Mount Pisgah. To quote the verse:
Sweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of prayer
May I Thy consolation share,
Till from Mount Pisgah's lofty height
I view my home and take my flight.
This robe and flesh I'll drop and rise
To seize the everlasting prize,
And shout while passing through the air,
"Farewell, farewll sweet hour of prayer.
Pretty cool verse, right? It of course makes reference to the same passage of scripture in Deuteronomy regarding Moses. Now, as I sat in my pew during the sermon today, I kept thinking of that line, "Till from Mount Pisgah's lofty height", over and over again. I knew I had heard a reference to Pisgah in another song. Of course, me being me, this distracted me the majority of the service, then the majority of the day and so on and so forth. Then, I got it! It's mentioned in an old country song as the name of a town. The song? "The Old Home and Filler Up and Keep On A Truckin' Cafe" by C.W. McCall. Many of you probably don't know who C.W. McCall is, let alone the song, but he's a great artist with hilarious songs, and this one is one of them. The verse in this case, however, goes like this:
She allowed as how it sounded like a whole lot of fun,
But we was gonna have to wait until the dishes were done.
And was it alright with me if she brought along her mother as a chaperone.
I said why not.
Well we geared that Tranny (not in the sexual sense) into super low and the four of us went to see a picture show
Yeah, I took 'em to the drive-in theatre over by Pisgah to see "True Grit"
Obviously, since his songs always tell a story, there's a lot of explanation needed as to how the song got to that point, but I'm not going to provide that. I'll let this link do that: "Old Home Filler Up and Keep On a Truckin"
Is there a point to this blog? Not really. By the way, Pisgah is a real town in Iowa, and the same town referred to in the song by McCall. He has a tendency to refer to little known, real places in his songs. Anyway, there really isn't a point, other than I thought it was pretty funny the contrast in songs that Pisgah is referred to in, from a beautiful, thoughtful, powerful hymn to a funny country song. And that it drove me nuts all day as to where I'd heard Pisgah before. Anyway, that's pretty much it. If you hung with the story this long, I'm sorry. Unless it turns out you've never heard one or the other, or both of these songs before and I've turned you onto something. If that's the case, you're welcome. Anyway, I guess the Bible has a pretty far reaching influence if it ended up in a C.W. McCall song.
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