©1994 Birdwing Music (a div. of the Sparrow Corporation) (ASCAP)
From Poiema by Michael Card
And the call is
to community
In an upstairs room
A parable is just about to come alive
And while they bicker about who's best
With a painful glance He'll silently rise
Their Savior Servant must show them how
Through the will of the water
And the tenderness of the towel
CHORUS
And the call is to community
The impoverished power that sets the soul free
In humility to take the vow
That day after day we must take up
The basin and the towel
In any ordinary
place
On any ordinary day
The parable can live again
When one will kneel and one will yield
Our Savior Servant must show us how
Through the will of the water
And the tenderness of the towel
And the space between
ourselves sometimes
Is more than the distance between the stars
By the fragile bridge of the servant's bow
We take up the basin and the towel
January 27, 2003 (Al): Nicole has been a fan of Michael Card for many years. I had been fond of a few of his songs--"El Shaddai" and "Love Crucified Arose," for example--for a long time. However, I got to meet him in person at the Moody Bible Institute Enrichment Confererence for Foreign Ministry Workers earlier this month. He actually held Joël in the back of the auditorium the last night before getting ready to sing! I appreciated his humble spirit and profound reflections about creativity. He said that helping introduce people to Jesus was the greatest act of creativity, as each individual is so different. He also said that the greatest way of serving people and washing their feet was by listening to them.
He sang this song
during the conference in Budapest and it struck me (even though Nicole had played
it many times in Paris). It is based upon John 13:4. He writes, "John
records none of Jesus' parables because for him Jesus' life was a parable. The
footwashing was such amoment of meaning."
