Avenged Sevenfold (2007) "Gunslinger"

[reprinted as written by Avenged Sevenfold]
As performed by A7X [with a very moving video]

Yeah, you've been alone
I've been gone for far too long
But with all that we've been through
After all this time I'm coming home to you

Never let it show
The pain I've grown to know
'Cause with all these things we do
It don't matter when I'm coming home to you

I reach towards the sky I've said my goodbyes
My heart's always with you now
I won't question why so many have died
My prayers have made it through yeah
'Cause with all these things we do
It don't matter when I'm coming home to you

Letters keep me warm
Helped me through the storm
But with all that we've been through
After all this time I'm coming home to you

I reach towards the sky I've said my goodbyes
My heart's always with you now
I won't question why so many have died
My prayers have made it through yeah
'Cause with all these things we do
It don't matter when I'm coming home to you

I've always been true
I've waited so long just to come hold you
I'm making it through
It's been far too long, we've proven our
love over time's so strong, in all that we do
The stars in the night, they lend me their light
to bring me closer to heaven with you

(Bring me closer)

But with all that we've been through
After all this time I'm coming home to you

I reach towards the sky I've said my goodbyes
My heart's always with you now
I won't question why so many have died
My prayers have made it through yeah
'Cause with all these things we do
It don't matter when I'm coming home to you

And with all that we've been through
After all this time I'm coming home to you

M Shadows explained the basis behind the song, saying, "'I was specifically writing it for our troops in Iraq, and people who are at war anywhere in the country, or anywhere in any country, that are away from people they love.'

"Zacky also adds, 'Instead of b**ching and complaining about whose fault it is, or why they’re over there fighting wars, it’s just the human element of being separated from the people you love.' However, M. Shadows says the song isn’t directed at just that: 'I also think that the song is not so directed at that, to where someone that’s just on vacation can’t, or someone that’s on tour and missing their loved ones can’t, relate to the song.'”

The night before he was going to be nailed up to a cross, Jesus began preparing His disciples for what was coming,

Jesus knew that the time had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love...

"I am with you for only a short time longer. You are going to look high and low for me. But just as I told the Jews, I'm telling you: 'Where I go, you are not able to come.'

"Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other."

Simon Peter asked, "Master, just where are you going?"

Jesus answered, "You can't now follow me where I'm going. You will follow later..."

"Don't let this throw you. You trust God, don't you? Trust me. There is plenty of room for you in my Father's home. If that weren't so, would I have told you that I'm on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I'm on my way to get your room ready, I'll come back and get you so you can live where I live. And you already know the road I'm taking."

Thomas said, "Master, we have no idea where you're going. How do you expect us to know the road?"

Jesus said, "I am the Road, also the Truth, also the Life. No one gets to the Father apart from me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him. You've even seen him!"

How would the disciples be able to keep their relationship rich and current with Jesus if He went away? Jesus explained that He would send them His Spirit to be with them in a heretofore never even imagined way: He would live within them, literally be inside of them, in their inner being,

I still have many things to tell you, but you can't handle them now. But when the Friend comes, the Spirit of the Truth, he will take you by the hand and guide you into all the truth there is. He won't draw attention to himself, but will make sense out of what is about to happen and, indeed, out of all that I have done and said. He will honor me; he will take from me and deliver it to you. Everything the Father has is also mine. That is why I've said, 'He takes from me and delivers to you.'

What happened in the next few days was devastating to these eleven men. Jesus was dragged from one court to the next, indicted, sentenced to death, beaten, mocked and tortured. His execution was the grimmest known to mankind, and the most degrading. By the time he was dead his disciples were utterly undone.

When He rose from the dead it took Him over a month to convince the disciples, and all His followers (five hundred of them at that time) that He really was alive again. But then, one day, standing on the Mount of Olives,

When they were together for the last time they asked, "Master, are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now? Is this the time?"

He told them, "You don't get to know the time. Timing is the Father's business. What you'll get is the Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all over Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world."

These were his last words. As they watched, he was taken up and disappeared in a cloud. They stood there, staring into the empty sky. Suddenly two men appeared—in white robes! They said, "You Galileans!—why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly—and mysteriously—as he left."

Now what? Jesus had promised to stay in touch in a mysterious way that they could hardly imagine. He had even, in the days after He rose again,

... took a deep breath and breathed into them. "Receive the Holy Spirit,"

But what did that mean? They had been used to being with Jesus day and night, living with Him, working with Him, learning from Him, having such a close friendship with Him as to be like brothers. Now He was gone for who knew how long; way more gone than like on a trip! This was as gone as a person could get, gone to heaven.

Relationships that don't keep current tend to fade away, and when you and I are really lonely for someone, just conjuring up pictures of them in our minds, trying to remember what their voice sounds like... it isn't enough. Intimacy needs to be cared for, needs to be kept current, as the poet said,

Letters keep me warm
Helped me through the storm

With so much longing while apart, staying faithful, looking forward to being together again, what keeps the love strong is keeping in touch.

Jesus knew that and had prepared for it. A little over a week later, as they were waiting for whatever it was that Jesus had told them to wait for, a hundred and twenty of Jesus' closest friends and family were swept up in a powerful way,

When the Feast of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Without warning there was a sound like a strong wind, gale force—no one could tell where it came from. It filled the whole building. Then, like a wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread through their ranks, and they started speaking in a number of different languages as the Spirit prompted them.

The Holy Spirit helped them remember everything Jesus had said and done, guided them in recording it all for others to read, and enabled them to explain what Jesus taught in ways that people could apply to their everyday lives. All that became the new testament, God's letters to His people to hang onto until He came back for them to take them home with Him.

And the same holds true all the way down the centuries to you and me today. The apostle Paul explained that for every believer, every person who asks Jesus for forgiveness, asks Him to come into his or her life, asks to be reborn, for each one,

God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

Paul explored this whole dynamic in his letter to the Christians in Rome,

Those who enter into Christ's being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn't deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.

The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.

Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn't pleased at being ignored.

But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won't know what we're talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God's terms. It stands to reason, doesn't it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he'll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ's!

So don't you see that we don't owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There's nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God's Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!

This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike "What's next, Papa?" God's Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what's coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we're certainly going to go through the good times with him!

That's why I don't think there's any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what's coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.

All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it's not only around us; it's within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We're also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don't see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.

Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God's Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don't know how or what to pray, it doesn't matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.

God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.

So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn't hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn't gladly and freely do for us

The way to keep the relationship rich, intimate, satisfying, current is read God's letters (the Bible) and to stay connected with Him by talking to Him (prayer) and listening to Him as He communicates through His Spirit to you and me.

My heart's always with you now
I won't question why so many have died
My prayers have made it through yeah
'Cause with all these things we do
It don't matter when I'm coming home to you

[Thankfully, more compassion and a commitment to care for our veterans is on the way]

If this post got you to thinking, please leave a comment and join the conversation