BackstageThere is a woman named Doña Carmen. She is a composite of a hundred real ones, and she has a yellow floral couch in a little barrio chapel, and on the arm of that couch sits a Bible worn soft and a prayer list pinned where she won't lose it. The city she lives in does not know she exists. No census of importance has ever counted her. No program ever put her name on a slide. And she has been holding that whole neighborhood together with intercession for thirty years.
I wrote a record about her, and about everyone like her. Dios en el Margen, God in the Margin, is that record. And the thesis is not the polite one the church usually offers. We usually say God reaches down to the margin, God sends help to the margin, as if the center were where He lives and the edge were where He does outreach. I am telling you something more dangerous and more true: Yeshua was already in the margin when the rest of us finally showed up. He never left. He was born there.
What the title means
Dios en el Margen means "God in the Margin", the margin being the edge of the page, the part the eye skips, the place the city forgets on purpose. The people who live there in my songs are specific: the night-shift worker clocking out at 6:32 in the morning with his boots heavy, the man selling honest work for honest pay, the grandmother on the couch, "los nombres que la ciudad olvidó", the names the city forgot.
I set the whole thing to sertanejo, the Brazilian countryside music of dueto harmony, two male voices singing in thirds and sixths like brothers who have worked the same field. I did that because sertanejo is not city music. It is the music of the people the city drives past. The viola caipira, the accordion warm as fresh bread, this is the sound of the overlooked, and I wanted the overlooked to hear their own music carrying the highest news there is.
Why I had to make it
Because I got tired of a gospel that treated poor people as a project instead of family.
There is a track on this album called "Familia, No Proyecto", Family, Not a Project, and it is the beating heart of the whole thing. The handshake you give a project turns into an embrace you give a family, and the difference is everything. The margin does not need to be studied. It needs to be sat down with. And when you sit down with it, you discover Yeshua got there before you.
He told us this plainly. He stood up and said, "Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God" (Luke 6:20). Not blessed are the poor because one day we'll get around to them. Theirs is the Kingdom. Present tense. It already belongs to them. That is why one of the songs is simply called "El Reino Pertenece a Ellos", the Kingdom Belongs to Them, and it modulates up a whole key right at the twist, because the twist is the good news itself.
The song that names the whole record
The title I would put over this entire album is a track called "El Reino No Vino En Limosina", the Kingdom did not come in a limousine.
Think about how Yeshua actually arrived. He "humbled himself" (Philippians 2), He was laid in a feed trough, He grew up on a dust road, He had nowhere to lay His head. The King of everything skipped the motorcade entirely. He came in on foot, in the dust, at the level of the people the parade route never passes. So when I sing that the Kingdom did not come in a limousine, I am not being clever. I am reading you the birth certificate.
And if that is how the King came, then that is where the King still is. Not idling at the front gate of the nice part of town. Out at the margin, on foot, knocking on the doors nobody official ever knocks on.
The table, and the door
Two images run through the middle of this album, and they are the two images I would build a whole ministry on.
The first is the door. "La Puerta Abierta," the Posada Anthem, reaches back to our old Christmas tradition of the posada, the reenactment where Mary and Joseph go door to door looking for room. I flipped it. In my version the door opens. It leans on Hebrews 13:2, "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." Every stranger at the door might be carrying more of heaven than you are. Open it.
The second is the table. "La Mesa Está Servida", the Table Is Set, and "El Pan Partido," the broken bread, the leftovers from when Yeshua fed thousands out of a boy's lunch and twelve baskets were left over (Matthew 14). The Kingdom's table has a way of stretching past the number of people you counted. You set it for the ones you invited, and it feeds the ones you forgot. That is not bad planning. That is how His table has always worked.
Set the table longer than your guest list. The Kingdom always eats past the count.
The saints nobody canonized
There is a song near the end called "Santos Que Nadie Llamó Santos", Saints Nobody Called Saints. The night-shift cleaner. The grandmother on the couch. The man with calloused hands who was made in the image of God and never once got told so. I put them inside Hebrews 11, that long roll of the faithful, because the writer of Hebrews ran out of room and just said "time would fail me to tell" of all of them. Heaven's list of the faithful is longer than earth's list of the famous, and the two lists barely overlap.
"Trabajo Honrado", Honest Work, sings that man's dignity back to him, straight from Genesis: he is made in the image of the Maker (Genesis 1:27), and his calloused hands are not a mark of his lowness but a signature of his likeness to a God who also builds.
Who this album is for
This one is for the barrio chapel with the folding chairs. For the worker who clocks out when the rest of the city clocks in. For Doña Carmen and her yellow couch and her pinned-up prayer list. For every believer the church has quietly filed under outreach when God has already filed them under family.
And it is for the rest of us, the ones who assumed the center was where God lived. Come out to the edge of the page. Come sit on the couch. Come eat at the table that stretches past the count. He is already here. He never came in a limousine, and He never will. He came on foot, into the margin, and He is still here, and "aquí está el reino", here is the Kingdom.
Pull up a chair. There's room. There was always room.
