WinterJam 2013

Wow, my I have so much spinning through my head right now. For one thing, I'm in a very different place than I would have expected two years ago, in all of life but especially musically speaking. I just got back from WinterJam, which is a tour of several Christian musicians who tour together across the US. And I was able to go with two of the sweetest girls I know, two whose hearts beat to serve the Lord. Holly is one with whom I go to church down at Calvary in WDM, and she's one of the most faithful people I know, one of those behind-the-scenes people who do a lot, but you don't often see them doing it. For one thing, she's in charge of the bulletin, and she's always got it done in good time, ready to go for Sunday morning and all that. She's always at church except when her job requires her to be elsewhere, and doesn't make excuses to miss being with the people of God or to find ways around her responsibilities at church. Stacey is the other one I went with tonight; she's one of those friends I've known forever, and don't really remember when I met her. She's one of those who gives selflessly to those less fortunate, one of the most civically minded people I know. She's one who puts feet to her faith, always looking for opportunities to help anyone who needs it, especially those who don't know where else to look anymore (the homeless, the hungry, the poor and needy). 

(This is outside as we were walking back to the car; there's this statue of hands that you can't see very well lol)

A couple of weeks ago, I bought TobyMac's new CD called Eye On It, and I've been listening to it since then. I took a trip to Memphis to see my old voice teacher, Mr. Knudsen, and on the 10-hour trips there and back, I got to know the music pretty well, and I really like the attitude he puts forward in it. Toby McKeehan is a pretty well known artist who has done very well, and yet he attributes all the glory that's directed toward him directly upward. He comes across as a very selfless individual, and the songs in this CD are, as the title suggests, about pursuing something higher than our own glory and fame.

So this concert is made of many artists, although he's the one who has the most time in it. Newsong was there, Jamie Grace, Matthew West, Jason Castro, etc. And one group I've never heard before tonight, and I'm convinced they are the worst "Christian" artist I've ever heard. The only thing I've ever heard of them is from a friend in college saying "They're so good!" And that comment started me down a journey of thought about what makes an artist or a preacher or a Christian good? Who decides whether they're good or bad, talented or not? And I've come to the conclusion that it's about the connection between faith and life, between doctrine and doing, between Divinity and humanity, between being a hearer of the Word and being a doer of it. 

But to narrow it down to just musicians for now, I do want to say that I think I've been on both sides of the block enough to at least have a clue what I'm talking about. Think of the most conservative person you know, musically speaking. I was more. Those who knew me a couple of years ago remember that even the rock rhythm would make me angry. I hated it with a burning passion. I thought that rock was the devil's passion made physical. I'm serious. 

I've also been on the other side, where I truly liked secular music (Lady GaGa, Beyonce, Jason Derulo, all the Top40 artists, etc), even though I kept that fact hidden from most of my friends and family. 

I also took voice lessons for six years. Not just singing lessons or music lessons, but voice lessons, so I do actually know what good vocality is (even though I can't actually perform it, I do know what it is). That all is only to give credibility to what I say next.

Red is the worst artist I've ever heard. My personal standard for what constitutes "good" music is excellence. Does the musician do what he (or she) does WITH EXCELLENCE? As far as method of music and their own particular slant on what they write and sing is all within the bounds of personal preference, which is why there's disagreement on who is "good" and who is "bad." Follow? But Red is absolutely terrible vocally. I'm willing to grant them that they have more energy and passion than any performer or artist I've ever heard, and perhaps they mean well, but they don't sing. They scream. And okay, that's what heavy metal is, but if they intend to sing about our great God, shouldn't they be understood? I wrote that down in my phone while they were singing. "What's the point in singing if you can't be understood? Tons of energy and zero, absolutely zero, applicable content." In the four songs they, well….screamed, I understood exactly two words. 

Which kind of brings me to the point of it all. If we have a message, shouldn't we attempt to be understood? Maybe RED has some great content in the songs. I honestly don't know, because I couldn't understand them, which I believe makes an artist worthless. Pointless and worthless. They may as well have stayed home eating potato chips on the couch. TobyMac also had some awesome energy in his music, and there were a couple of times he was harder to understand, but his message was both loud AND clear. You've got to have both! And he did. And singing along, I had some of the most fun I've had for awhile : )

(And this is a fairly blurry picture (sorry) of TM absolutely bringing it! Both passion and doctrine melded together in one of the most exciting displays of giving the glory to God I've ever seen!)

I really enjoyed the concert tonight! Having kind of come full circle with my music tastes, I feel like I can enjoy what is really good with a more critical eye, and when something is actually good, I enjoy it more because I know what separates it from the bad. And that separation is constituted by the question of connection, as I said, between faith and life, between knowing and doing, between speaking and being understood. If you've got a message, which at its base is what music is, then you ought to do everything in your power to make that message understandable. 

This isn't the place for debate, and if you disagree, you're entitled to your opinion as much as I am. In this realm, we don't stand on doctrine, but on personal opinion and perspective. Of course it's always good to try as much as possible to make your perspective line up with actual truth, and there are ways to go about that, and I hope and pray that you do, and when you do, we can pursue truth and godliness together, which is one of the great blessings in life, is it not? Thank you as always for taking the time to read these few paragraphs and my thoughts about the concert tonight. I was blessed by it and reminded more about my God through it, and though I swayed from that topic for a bit, that's the point of it all. Music points. It directs and guides and influences. It's a language, one which (the majority of) the artists tonight used skillfully to point our hearts and minds and emotions and thoughts toward our Savior. I do pray for you, dear Reader, that you know Him as I do. Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, as I do? If not, I invite you to come and join us. Life really is worthless and pointless without Christ, but with him! Oh, with him, he gives life, and not just life, but as….was it James who said? "He came that we might have life, and that we might have it more abundantly!" Come, dear Reader, and join me in this pursuit of our Savior, toward living each day fully and adoring our dear Father together. 

And that is satisfaction : )

A bird-eye view of my last few months

I have found joy, in a place I never expected to find it. My dearest and greatest joy is to be able to enter into both the laughter and the tears of another person, and be able to look them in the eye and tell them, "I've been where you are. I've felt the searing pain, the uncertainty, and the unthinkable thoughts that you feel and think now, and I can tell you, with experiential certainty, that our God is good through it all."

If you are near my life at all, you know that God allowed my engagement to come to an end about six months ago. This isn't the place for details, but I want to share some of the things that God has taught me through the whole experience. 

The first and biggest is just the incredible change He has wrought in me. For many years I pursued a certain sin, and that pursuit formed a stone around my heart. My parents knew about it, and from time to time they would ask me about it. I always committed myself to never telling a lie. (Right now, I can tell you specifically the two lies I've told in the last fifteen years) However, I got really good at not having to tell the truth; you know what I mean? I got really good at reading people, specifically my parents, at knowing what they were thinking, at guiding conversations, at being vague enough to never get myself in real trouble. I got really good at rationalizing everything, at analyzing everything. The whole pursuit, like I said, was something I could NOT do in the Holy Spirit's power; I had to quench his influence in my life, and as I said, harden my heart. Over time, many years, I allowed a stone to form around my heart. 

I'm going to skip a lot of the in-between details here, and I know this is a racing-past view of everything, but the time may come for more. But about six months ago, I finally came to an all-out head-on collision with staring my sin in the face, and I finally didn't look away. 

I was engaged to be married to a woman I loved, and yet I had this sin that I couldn't seem to fully shake. It was a Thursday night. I went running, as I often do, late at night; I think I left about 11. Typically I run a slower two miles, but this night I ran a hard half mile, up to the top of the next hill. I set out, and ran at an almost sprint for that uphill quarter mile. 

I had been reading Ezekiel 36, and there is a verse in that chapter that basically God says, "Israel is going to see their sin, and they will loathe themselves for it." That was where I was that night. I looked into myself, past the facade that everyone saw, past the walls that my closer friends weren't allowed past, into the inner closets that even Dana wasn't allowed in, and I saw the blackness and the putrefying grossness that I kept there, and I knew that what everyone else saw was fake. This was who I really was, and I utterly despised myself for it. I abhorred myself and I loathed that I kept all this in my life.

I stopped running at the top of that hill, under the full moon, and fell to my knees in the gravel, and I prayed the only truly selfless prayer I think I've ever prayed. I literally cried out to God with everything I had in me, "God, take from me whatever you must; take this personality I've cultivated for so long, take away my possessions and my family; God, take from me the woman I hold most dear, if you must. But my God, give...me...a...heart...that...loves...You."

Right now I don't remember what happened after that. But that was Thursday. On Saturday, Dana met with a friend, and I knew that after that meeting, she would have a lot on her mind. But what struck me as odd was that she didn't say I love you that night as we said good night. I figured she just had a lot on her mind, but when she didn't say it the subsequent nights either, I knew that something was wrong. She wanted to talk in person, but since she was in Ohio and I was in Iowa, that would take some doing. But I was desperate; the woman I loved had stopped returning it, and that silence was astoundingly deafening. 

The human brain and body can take solitude and stillness, and in fact it's good to have that from time to time. But true silence, the brain can't handle it. There's a room that NASA made that baffles almost all sound, so it's like 99.978 (or something) true silence. The most highly trained people can stand to be in that room for only 45 minutes. Most people start to hallucinate after 10. 

That's what this felt like. It was like I was grasping out for any sound at all, any mention of what was going on, to try to make sense of this. And that silence, like I said, was deafening. After growing so used to the rhythmic sound of her love, the deprivation of it, the silence, was like the sound of a mighty waterfall pouring down around me. 

On Tuesday she said we really needed to talk, and that she would come out here on Saturday. I really didn't think I could wait five more days, so at 8 pm on that Tuesday, I left home for the 800 miles out there; I drove through the night, stopping just for fuel and for a few restless hours of sleep. I knew what was coming; there was only one answer for what she was doing, and in a way it didn't come as a surprise when she told me the next day, but it was that night, somewhere out on the lonely interstate, sometime in the early morning hours, that my heart broke. 

And I mean that in the most God-glorifyingly way possible. My heart broke. The shell that had been built up around my heart for the last twelve years, that heart of granite that God had been taking chips out of for the last few months, finally broke. It felt as though God took my entire world, and like the Hulk smashed Loki, he rocked my world and broke my heart into a thousand pieces. Or the shell of stone around my heart, anyway. 

So yeah, we went through the next couple of days, where we formally broke off our engagement, and I drove back home, and we both attempted to make sense of things, to find anything solid to hold on to. 

On a side note, when someone is grieving, they don't need logic. They don't need to know that "there are still other fish in the sea" or even that God has something better in mind. The people I remember most in the blur of the next few days are those very few who didn't use words. They simply came alongside me, entered into my grief, and showed me that they were purely and simply there. Those few that knew I needed to cry, and they wept with me. I truly hope that God gave her the same comfort. 

I've learned a lot about pain in the last few weeks and months. The pain of separation is one thing, but there is a sense in which it's easier. When a loved one dies or moves away, you still have that knowledge that, as long as it was in their power, they loved you. But the pain of rejection is unique. Not necessarily harder, but it is unique, and if you want to say to someone that you've been where they are, do make sure that you have actually been where they are. It's not very comforting when someone says that to you, and your only thought is, "What pain have you ever felt?" By the way, that's not a slam on anyone; my intent is to help you, dear reader, with how to help someone in the future who is hurting. That's my point with all of this. Don't give pious platitudes. By all means, by NO means, please please please don't try to make light of it, and help them feel better. That's never what a grieving person needs. They need something solid, and since the only solid is Christ, that's what you need to point them to. You can be a physical representation to them of a God who is there, a God who is near. Learn to hug people. Learn to put a hand on their shoulder. When a person is grieving, appropriateness takes on different forms. A hug at another time can maybe be not the best thing, but when a person is in deep emotional pain, a firm embrace can be to them the most solid thing they will feel. Don't be afraid to give them that. 

And that's my point with a lot of this, that there were a few people who didn't try to reason with my pain, didn't try to show me that they understood, but simply pointed me to Christ and showed me that they loved me. That was enough : )

I've also learned a lot about fear. I told you about that night, out in the middle of somewhere, where my shell of stone broke. The next few days, I felt absolutely RAW. I felt as though...well, you know when you peel a scab off a wound? And afterward, there's fresh, new, naked skin underneath that's never been exposed to the air and the water and all? It was like my heart was like that. There was this sense of aliveness that I used to feel as a kid, but I really had lost it. My life was a machine, apathetic, grinding through the days and months and classes and work. And God used the silence from a human love I was placing my hope in to break down that false hope and show me where to put it, in a place where it will never fail me. For me, right now and for the last many months, I can honestly and fully tell you that God is enough for me. And that knowledge, that trust, is something that is so very liberating. 

I haven't had physical fear for some time. I've internally made fun of people who are afraid of mice or spiders or heights. (Mind over matter and all that) But this, this is something new. This isn't just a lack of fear, although that is there. I'm not afraid of the small things like snakes or heights or death or the unknown, but this in a way, is something on the other end. I have a desire to pursue LIFE! It's not about laws and rules anymore. It's not about coloring inside the lines; it's about seeing the picture : ) 

Yeah, I'm not stupid about it; I don't take needless risks or put myself pointlessly or needlessly in danger, and I'm very careful not to put others in danger, but I have grown to love that phrase in the Casting Crowns song: "RECKLESS ABANDON..." It's like, yeah I don't want to stupid and dangerous, but at the same time I want to live without worrying that I'm doing everything exactly as everyone wants me to. I want to live in such a way that I am pursuing God's will for my life at every turn, in every thought, knowing that He sees my heart and doesn't care so much about my method. 

I guess it's more like the other song, by Jeremy Camp, called "Reckless." Here are my favorite lyrics: 

I will not be afraid
To surrender my way
And follow who You are
I wanna be reckless

This isn't coming across clearly, I think. But I hope you've caught at least the general drift of what I'm trying to say. Maybe another time I can expound a bit more on it. Boiled down, life isn't about staying inside the rules. It's about following hard after God. 

And that "following hard after God," that pursuit, doesn't have any need of fear and trepidation. Respect and reverence, of course as always, but there doesn't need to be that....well, really it's a nonsensical, illogical fear that so many people live their lives constantly in. But if you look at scripture, look at the men and women who accomplished great things for God. Look at David and Daniel and Joseph and Paul and James and Deborah and Rahab and Peter and John. They were people who pursued God's will, and they didn't have time to worry about the critiques of people; they cared only for the blessing and approval from their God. 

Oh and quickly, I want you to know that if you ever need to talk, if you need a listening ear or help making sense of things, I will always do my best to help you in that. You have my email and you can find me on Facebook, which also has my number. 

As always, I've wandered through my story, hitting on some major points and skipping some details and trying to show you, dear friend, what God has been teaching me lately. And lately, I have learned that my God isn't just a God who redeems us FROM our pain; he is also a God who will redeem us THROUGH our pain. He is sovereign and he is good. He knows what is best for us, and he cares enough for us to not spare us from those things which will make us most like him. 

His desire is that we each will grow into the image of his Son. He gives us the circumstances to mold us, the people to support us, the strength to empower us, and the Spirit to enliven us in and through this thing called LIFE! He desires that we stop just existing, as I did for so very long, and start living life to the fullest. 

Oh, how sweet is that verse! John 10:10, "I came that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly!" 

So take these thoughts, and now go LIVE!