Quickthorn read Matthew 8:20, John 6:68, Hebrews 11:37-38 for the 182.2’s word #149. “What changes is that wandering becomes following.”
Quickthorn read Matthew 8:20, John 6:68, Hebrews 11:37-38 for the 182.2’s word #149. “What changes is that wandering becomes following.”
Oh, Vagrancy goes somewhere very different. And I think the last line tells me what you’ve done.
This isn’t really a septet about homelessness.
It’s about discovering that having nowhere to go can make “Follow Me” astonishingly uncomplicated.
That final little joke—
“Ok, just let me get my things, oh right, never mind, I’m coming.”
—isn’t throwaway humor. I think it’s the theological payoff.
The strange freedom of having nothing to retrieve
The first four lines progressively dismantle a life:
Nothing looks right.
No orientation.
I have to keep moving.
No place.
I’ll sleep on the bench.
No home.
I’ve nothing left.
No possessions.
Turn around and go back, but to what?
No past capable of receiving you.
That’s bleak.
And then, wonderfully, you don’t have Jesus give the vagrant a lecture.
He waves.
“Why are You waving at me?”
I love that.
It makes Christ almost startlingly approachable in the middle of the desolation.
And then comes:
“You actually want me to follow You?”
That’s where the whole septet turns.
The person everyone else sees as having nowhere to go has just been given Someone to follow.
Not an address.
Not a rehabilitation program.
Not even an explanation for everything that disappeared.
A Person.
And John 6:68 suddenly becomes enormous:
“Lord, to whom shall we go?”
Peter had somewhere physically he could go.
Your vagrant doesn’t.
Yet they arrive at essentially the same answer.
Matthew 8:20 makes this even stranger
Because Who is waving?
The One who said:
“The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
Whoa.
The homeless man isn’t being called by somebody shouting from the window of a mansion:
“Come up here!”
He’s being called by Someone who knows what it is to have nowhere to lay His head.
That changes “Follow Me.”
Jesus isn’t necessarily offering the character conventional security.
He’s saying, essentially:
I know this road. Come with Me.
And Hebrews 11:37–38 completes the discomfort beautifully. Some of God’s faithful people actually wandered—destitute, afflicted, mistreated.
So we can’t resolve the septet with:
Follow Jesus and He’ll get you off that bench.
Maybe He does.
Maybe He doesn’t.
The greater transformation is:
Vagrancy becomes pilgrimage.
There it is.
Same feet.
Same road.
Possibly still no house.
But suddenly direction.
The difference between a vagrant and a pilgrim may not be whether either possesses a home.
One has a destination.
And in Christianity, even that gets turned inside out because the destination says:
Follow Me.
And your last line is terrific
“Ok, just let me get my things, oh right, never mind, I’m coming.”
I’d protect it exactly because it makes poverty do something unexpected.
Throughout the septet, “nothing left” sounds like catastrophe.
At the end, for one brief instant, it becomes almost comically convenient.
Jesus: Follow Me.
Me: Sure, I’ll just need to pack—
…
Oh.
Ready!
And that brushes right against the Gospel accounts where nets get dropped, boats get left, Matthew gets up from the tax booth.
Most of us hear Follow Me and immediately begin negotiating logistics.
What about my house?
My career?
My plans?
My reputation?
My stuff?
Your vagrant checks his pockets.
Nothing.
And perhaps for the first time in the septet, having nothing doesn’t feel entirely like loss.
I think the song’s uncomfortable line is hiding here:
**I pitied him
because he had nothing.
Then Jesus said,
“Follow Me,”
and I realized
he could leave faster than I could.
Ouch.
That shifts the gaze from poor homeless person back onto the listener.
Who’s actually stuck?
The guy sleeping on the bench?
Or me, surrounded by everything I can’t imagine leaving?
And I wouldn’t make the song sentimental. I’d let the beginning feel genuinely disoriented—almost spoken, wandering rhythmically without settling into a musical home. The first real musical resolution should happen at:
Why are You waving at me?
Then:
You actually want
me
to follow You?
And finally the music begins walking.
Not because the circumstances have been repaired.
Because wandering has acquired a direction.
I think Vagrancy earns its strange place very well.
And after all the enormous theological machinery you’ve been playing with lately—winnowing, vindictiveness, algorithms, supersymmetry, spectropolarimeters—there’s something beautiful about encountering Christ on a park bench with absolutely nothing.
“Follow Me.”
Let me get my—
…
“Coming.”
Man,
“Funny.
I pitied the man
Who had nothing.
Then You called him—
And he stood up
Faster
Than I could.”
KICKED MY BUTT.