Coal Miner’s Daughter by Loretta Lynn

Well I was born the coal miner’s daughter in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler
We were poor but we had love that’s the one thing that daddy made sure of
He shovel coal to make a poor man’s dollar
My daddy worked all night in the Vanleer coal mine all day long in the field hoein’ corn
Mommie rocked the baby that night and read the Bible by the coal oil light
And everything would start all over come break of morn
Daddy loved and raised eight kids on a miner’s pay
Mommie scrubbed our clothes on a washboard everyday
Why I’ve seen her fingers bleed to complain there was no need
She’s smiled in mommie’s understanding way
In the summertime we didn’t have shoes to wear
But in the wintertime we’d all get a brand new pair
From a mail order catalog money made by selling a hog
Daddy always managed to get the money somewhere
Yeah I’m proud to be a coal miner’s daughter
I remember well the well where I drew water
The work we done was hard at night we’d sleep cause we were tired
I never thought I’d ever leave the Butcher Holler
But a lots of things have changed since the way back then
And it’s so good to be back home again
Not much left but the floor nothing lives there anymore
Just the mem’ries of a coal miner’s daughter

In just a few lines Loretta Lynn paints a picture of her identity, her values, and what she imagines a good life is. Look at the basic elements

• they were poor (financially) but love is more important than money
• Dad and Mom sacrificed for the children’s well-being. The kids learned to work too.
• The Bible was important
• 8 kids on a miner’s pay
• The love and the sacrifice were more praiseworthy and precious than the status that money or nice things afford

You can construct a whole culture around this. The image is also colored by a culture.

You could take many of the elements and tell a very different story, one of bitterness, resentment and loss.

Deuteronomy

In many ways the book of Deuteronomy attempts to do a similar thing for the people of Israel. Moses wants to cement their identity right before they go over into the new land. They need to know who they are and that involves where they came from, where they are going and what their relationship is with the one who is claiming them.

Obedience messages run throughout the story as they do throughout the book. We talked about them last week. 

• Obey so you may flourish in the land promised to your ancestors.
• He humbled you cause you to hunger to teach you that we don’t live by bread alone
• He took care of you
• He discipline you like a parent disciplines a child
• He’s bringing you into a good land with no scarcity
• Don’t let the abundance make you forget the value of what you’ll be given

Loretta and Deuteronomy

It is interesting to put the two piece next to one another. There are many similarities between them in terms of values.

• The value of relationships over affluence
• The value of what scarcity can teach and offer
• The danger of abundance to one’s character

Probably the biggest contrast is between the position of Loretta’s parents to that of God. In the song the parents were victims of a difficult situation. They had eight kids in a situation of poverty and perhaps even exploitation. The two good parents did whatever was necessary for the well-being of the kids. They practiced the kids well-being at the parent’s expense.

The God of Deuteronomy, however, is powerful. When we read 8:3 we hear that God could have gave them a more comfortable passage but instead had some lessons to teach.

Now this offends us. We might cherish Loretta’s parents because they did “the best they could” but for God to cause our suffering seems wrong. We might justify a parent doing some of this to a child, but it has its limits we assert and we wonder about God’s limits.

What Can’t God Seem to Do?

The whole story is told in a way that leads us to believe that comfort is a character hazard to humanity. Both stories suggest this. It illuminates a double bind.

• When God causes them to hunger in the desert, why can’t he just give them comfort?
• When God gives them comfort in the new land, why can’t he just make them immune to it’s corruption? It seems kind of like asking “Why can’t God make ice cream that won’t make me fat?”

It might be that the answer to the second question is the first. That God is banking on the memory of the desert wanderings to help make the second possible. He wants Israel to become the kind of people that can handle comfort, wealth and security and he uses suffering and scarcity to accomplish this.

This theme will be repeated again in chapter 9. When Israel is living in house they didn’t build, and eating from fields they didn’t clear of stones, how will then not develop a sense of entitlement?

What is so dangerous about a sense of entitlement? 

We should definitely ask this question because entitlement and demand seems to be a strategy that has taken root in our own culture.

• Assert your inherent status or a self-constructed status.
• Use whatever power you have (voice, force, influence) to maintain that status and don’t let anyone say they’re better than you.

If we imagine this narrative into either of Loretta’s song or the Deuteronomy story things start to look different.

Loretta might claim that her parents were negligent and abusive in not offering someone of Loretta’s obvious quality what her status dictates. How dare they have 8 children. They should have only had her if they didn’t have enough money for 8.

Israel could have made similar claims. How dare God bring them into a place of scarcity and not fulfill their wishes! They deserve better and will use whatever power they might have to secure it.

What you imagine, however, in both stories is that small child Loretta and newly freed Israel have, in fact, no leverage to use to make this claim. They can whine and complain all they want, even hold their breath but it won’t make any difference.

So maybe it is an emotional strategy for happiness and well-being? Loretta clearly feels blessed and grateful to her parents. Israel is supposed to fell blessed and grateful to God, sufficiently so to have it yield obedience and in doing so be further blessed. But is this too just a manipulative strategy or at least self-seeking?

Deuteronomy and the Longer Story

Again as I mentioned last week as Christians we view Deuteronomy in a longer story. Israel would in time in fact adopt a posture of entitlement. The warnings here would predict the future. She would begin to imagine herself standing not on God’s generosity for her but on her ability to provide for herself, something which if you drill all the way down becomes delusional. Israel couldn’t in the long term sustain herself, protect herself provide for herself. She would imagine that bread really was the basis for her existence and so when she was unable to provide bread for herself she had nowhere else to turn.

What perhaps might more be true is that we often vacillate between these positions.

• When times are good we imagine the good times are a result of our strength
• When times are bad we are forced to admit we are weak but then in resentment blame God for our troubles and demand that he restore us to comfort, where we revert to the first situation.

Jesus Quotes Deuteronomy 8

Deuteronomy 8 is famous because Jesus quotes it. When Jesus was in the wilderness, purposefully fasting for 40 days, the devil went out to tempt him and the first temptation was turning stones into bread, in other words self-sufficiency. Jesus quoted Moses.

The ironies are manifest. Jesus, who was self-sufficient, took on weakness and purposeful insufficiency for our well-being. This undercuts the suspicious narrative that the want God gave Israel in the desert was for anything but her own good.

Jesus changes the Deuteronomy 8 narrative from one learning from our own suffering to us learning from his. God is no longer king in the sky causing suffering but becomes our brother taking on our suffering, resisting the devil, resisting the self-sufficiency to actually become ready for receiving comfort.

Misery

Deuteronomy 8 undermines self-serving, naive narratives about ourselves

• That we are self-sufficient
• That we are not easily corrupted by comfort and affluence
• That we are not easily unfaithful and embittered by suffering

Deliverance

In Jesus God takes both roles in the narrative. He is the provider and the divine parent who makes us ready to grow up, ready to enter the promised land.

He also comes and plays our role too, suffers for us, with us, instead of us. He does so freely and invites us to learn of his suffering and practice his suffering on behalf of others.

Gratitude

GK Chesterton said “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

What God wanted for Israel, and what Jesus wants for us is to both bless us and to make us so that blessings won’t corrupt us.

What is amazing about Loretta’s song is how the poverty and the suffering are redeemed. The shack is gone, the pain is remembered, but now it only brings gratitude and glory.

We wonder about how God will redeem the sufferings of this world. Part of it is certainly the destruction of the want (water to wine, multiplication of the loaves and fishes), but part of it has to be the redemption of our stories.

It seems that what we see here is that. Loretta Lynn redeems her story of pain and suffering by making it a story of glory.

Jesus removes the suspicion that God is in it for himself, he takes on the suffering and if we remember our part in the story, our weakness, our rebellion, then we can in fact rightly enjoy heaven as a double blessing, as gratitude and wonder.