Tonight I’m up too late writing a paper comparing two early 1800’s writers and their fight for freedom.  For Sarah Grimké, it was the freedom to be educated and speak publicly as a woman.  For Frederick Douglass, it was freedom from slavery in America as a black living in Maryland.  They both have really poignant and valuable things to say, and I suggest reading some of their work if you feel compelled to make yourself thankful for your freedoms.  Tonight, Frederick Douglass made me thankful for my freedoms by talking about his lack thereof.  Upon secretly learning to read and filling his head with the writings of Sheridan and the like, he starts to comprehend that he could be free, and for the first time.  Interesting how literacy connects with liberty.

Here’s an excerpt from his book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass:

“Freedom had now appeared, to disappear no more forever.  It was heard in every sound, and seen in everything.  It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition.  I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it.  It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.”

We love the word “freedom”, being alive in a time and place where freedom is so real and so unadulterated, politically and legally speaking.  But freedom is just that to us, political and legal.  It’s defined structurally in contrast to boundaries and barriers, things that would stop us from expressing ourselves and living and doing as we please.  But man that is not freedom, and we don’t know yet “freedom”.  Freedom is bleeding down from that terrible cross, and I don’ t understand it’s weight and implication.

I think maybe freedom looks like my Bianchi bicycle.  Efficient and light, getting me anywhere I want to be in this town within in a few minutes, needing only the movement of my legs.  Freedom, because I’ll be at your house in a few minutes and I’m parking my car on your porch and locking it to the stairs, or maybe I’ll lean it on the tree in your front yard.  I get great joy out of the cheap, satisfying mobility it gives me, and the fact that I think my bike does that better than a lot of bikes.  Also I’m thankful because God thought it would bless me to stumble upon that specific craigslist add for the fixed-gear bike I swore I would never buy, that wound up brightening the whole summer and carrying me to and from class day after day when that summer was over.  Freedom, I guess I’m trying to say, is a little bit like the favor of God.  I guess it is the favor of God.  Pray for that.  Not that the favor of God equals material blessings like a trendy bike, but that the favor of God equals being able to realize the ways you’ve been blessed and living consciously in thankfulness about it.  It isn’t owning a bike that makes me excited every time I take it somewhere, it’s the fact that it took me somewhere and it didn’t have to be that convenient but hey, it was.  Thanks for that, thanks that You make my life easier God.

Now I wasn’t a slave ever, so that kind of freedom is something I don’t really understand.  But I was in a furnace once and saw a person in there with me I didn’t recognize.  He saved me from fiery torment and I didn’t even smell like smoke when I came out.  I was a sinner once, and am still.  But I was all at once restored and now, God sees me holy.  So that’s freedom I understand just a little better, because it’s freedom from  that guilt and confusion and darkness that rained mud into my water and death into my bones.  My Jesus is freedom to me.  Cliche?  No it isn’t.  In Galatians 4:5 God says “God sent Him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children.”  Real slavery remedied by real freedom for me.  I also know that, by 2 Corinthians 3:17, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”  And as for me, like Douglass wrote, as far as the Spirit of the Lord goes, as the freedom it is to me,

“I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it.  It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.”

Let freedom breathe in your storm.  Let Jesus be that peace.  He is that really possible freedom.

The devil doesn’t know what a marvelous creation you are.  The world can’t see how beautiful your life is, they only see what you look like and observe some of your actions.  Ever imagined what people would think of you if they saw all the way into your life?  What if they heard the songs you sing in your head all day?  What if they could feel the way you do when you see someone you really love?  Can you imagine if they knew the depth and the character you have!

I think everyone has character and I think every person is a marvelous creation.  That’s really what I believe.  I wish I would prove that by being better to people.  If you see me, tell me to be better to people.

If you think you’re a bad person, what perspective are you viewing yourself from?  Remember the people who say bad things about you don’t actually know you.  Remember that the world treats you wrong, the world is hard on you, but the world only sees your outside and only watches you live, not knowing why you do what you do, or at what cost.  Don’t let the world, the media, the other people, or anything else tell you who you are.  Good or bad, skinny, whatever.  I tell you, look at yourself as God looks at you.  He says He’s in love with you. (Romans 5:8)  He says he made you in his image. (Genesis 1:26)(Ps. 139)  What does that mean?  If He’s crazy about you, what are you?  A failure, a disaster, a mistake?  No, He is too good to see you that way.  God the just is satisfied to look on Jesus and pardon anything you’ve done.  Now He can see you they way he made you to be. You’re different, you’re sensational.  You’re a person of brilliant and unexplainable character, that’s what I think.  That’s what He says.

(If our God made us, us little people, with such unspeakable character, imagine what HIS character is like.  That’s why I want to get to know Him.)

Today, whatever you’re doing, whatever you feel like, remind yourself that God is good.  Be of Joy when life is bad, when you hurt, when your heart tells you’re lonely.  Tell it that the joy of the Lord is your strength, no person can be your strength.  You belong to the Lion of the ages, He’s not afraid of the changes, he’s in front and behind them.  He’s not the judge or the jury, He’s the evidence.  He’s got You on His mind.  That’s why I’m of joy, because I’m of Him.  It’s the right team to be on.  Either you’re on that team, or we want you.  It’s gonna light up the dark town you live in.

Walk with me in joy, walk with me and that great Fighter, our fearsome Friend, the King and God of all time.  Okay.

There’s a girl that comes into my work a lot, she started at CSU this year, but she’s always lived in Fort Collins.  Over the summer we had pancakes at IHOP and talked for and hour or two about life and everything else.  I loved getting to know her, she’s a cool person.  It’s fun taking the opportunity to just get to know someone with no guilt and no strings attached, as a single amongst happy couples without that ability.  Not that they would be jealous.  Not that I have no jealousy for them!  Her and I talked about a lot of things, but the one thing that made her different from anyone  else I’ve ever known is that she’s the daughter of two blind parents.  They both play organ at the Baptist church they all go to.  They’ve been blind all their lives, but have two or three children with fully functional vision.  I forget to thank God for my eyes.  I bet these children don’t forget to thank God for their eyes.  The oldest, whom I had pancakes with, has taken care of her parents her whole life.  This makes her interesting in a number of ways as a caregiver of sorts to them and as the only one in the family who drives, and the only one who uses a computer or reads the newspaper or watches TV.

This isn’t about her though, although I’d love to write about her more.  Her parents are the ones that fascinate me.  I can’t imagine what a story they have, not understanding the concept of color or light or geometry.  Do they see pictures in their minds?  How do they visualize objects when they’re brought up in conversation?  Do you think they connect the idea of a car instead with the noise it makes as it starts up, or passes on the street?  Is a toaster the sound it makes when bread pops out?  I mean lots of objects feel square, what distinguishes a toaster from other square things?  Here’s another crazy thought, how do you visualize your kids?  Each other?  We imagine what people look like when we think of them.  If you’ve never seen a person, what do you think when you think of them?

How did these people meet?  I bet it wasn’t anything like the way we like to meet people.  If you only know the sound of a person’s voice, and your first impressions of them are the way they talk to you first when they meet you, especially as a blind person, you look right away into their hearts instead of just at their skin.  What a healthy way to see people, what a tragically foreign concept.  If you’re blind and in love, you don’t grow fond of a face, a body.  You grow fond of the way they speak to you, the way a caring hand guides you through a world of shapes instead of colors.  The way a person looks doesn’t really exemplify the character or heart they have anyway, words do that.  You grow close to what your other senses gather about the person.  What a strange situation it must have been when they met!  Certainly they had one very specific thing in common, I’m sure they went from there.  I don’t know anything about these, people, so really I’m just speculating.  I’ve helped the woman order her food at my restaurant, and I’ve never met the husband either, but I’m about to infer something about them.

Here’s a thought.  If two blind people fall in love, having never seen each other, what is their relationship based on?  Certainly not that they both though each other was attractive, it must have been each other’s inner beauty, if I may use such a cliche.  They fall in love with, and are motivated by, each other’s heart.  Two blind people would be unaware, or at least unconcerned with each other’s fading beauty, so as they grow old, they only grow more beautiful to each other because the thing they love, the heart, gets more beautiful and more lovely with age.  I think that makes sense, or ideally it does.  Imagine, if put into our situation as people blessed with eyes, that we saw the person we loved get more and more beautiful physically as they grew old, and they saw us the same.  How wonderful, we only become more attractive to each other!  We need to care more, obviously, about the heart than the outward appearance.  A lot of people do care more about that.  I need to care more about that.  Not that it’s bad that we find each other beautiful.  In fact, I wish these parents could see what a lovely daughter they have!  He took a great deal of time fashioning our faces and frames, and we do no wrong appreciating his work.  But oh how we objectify the person for their form and face!

It is precious here to note that God is nothing like us.  ”Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart,” says 1 Samuel 16:7.  This means that God sees us sort of like blind couples might see each other.  He is less concerned with our hair and our eyes and our fitness, because the person He loves is the person He put inside our soul, to one day be released from this prison of a body that we hang clothes on, adorn with makeup, and for some strange reason, worship.  Instead of this confused, materialistic “love” that only deteriorates, we are seen instead to be more and more beautiful to Him because as we grow, God sees us more and more lovely all the time.  THAT is the God we serve!  That is a little glimpse of His character.  Our God is concerned with our hearts, not the body He placed us in to provide what ever set of challenges and trials we needed to grow through.  Moreover, that thing He does see, our spirit, He sees as PERFECT when we claim the precious blood of Jesus as payment for the sin we’ve separated ourselves from him by.  We are seen as perfect and spotless.  Because of the complete, redeeming work of Jesus, nothing can separate us now from the love of God.  BECAUSE God looks at the heart instead of outward appearances.

Why don’t I look at people that way?  I’m jealous for the love of these two blind people, although I thank God now for my eyes.  I’m jealous for their perspective and I hope I can learn from it.  I pray that family is doing well and that God lives among them.  Thank you God for your character that I don’t understand.

I learned some things today in the white wonderland that is Fort Collins that made me sad, especially after all my tree-talk the other day.

I mentioned in my last post that the “the oval”, a large circular drive that forms the perimeter of a small sort of park, is filled with a hundred or so trees, all over a hundred years old.  Today, walking to class with a knit hat and the most waterlogged thrift store shoes ever, I came upon that oval.  I found it barricaded, with caution tape tied from tree to tree all the way around, disallowing me to conveniently cross it diagonally.  As I walked a good third of a mile around, I watched as trucks cleaned up a number of enormous branches that had fallen from these huge trees sometime that last night while we all slept.  Enormous gashes in the trunks from missing limbs left these trees looking dismembered and bullied.  God must have walked through the oval while we slept in heated homes, carefully stepping over the trees we planted and stopping now and then to bend over and pull a few thousand-pound branches from hundred-foot trees like a kid might pull the legs off a grasshopper.  He had a good reason to do it cause he knows more about trees, but I was still sad.

I mentioned it to a friend of mine, asking why they didn’t fall to pieces like that last year when we got our first really big snow.  She said that our trees have a sort of tree cancer.  It’s a bug or a mold or something that kills them from the inside and I guess a lot of Colorado trees are dying from it.  I wonder what feels like for these anciently living organisms to feel suddenly and strikingly mortal after all they’ve seen.  Because of this sad tree disease,  the trees in the oval are terminal, and have become a lot weaker than they were in decades past when they stood up straight through the winter, arms raised to heaven like a charismatic.  This year, the heavy wet snow is heartless, felling branch by brittle branch and making it unsafe for the first time since Barrack Obama spoke underneath that canopy, to walk through the hallway of leaves I’m so normalized to.

I don’t know why I’m suddenly such a tree-hugger, but I’m really crushed by this.  How long have I known these trees?  Maybe three years?  Weren’t they planted like in 1870?  The year African-Americans could finally vote, the year Virginia rejoined the union, and the year they found and named Old Faithful.  My great grandparents were probably twenty-somethings or younger, still unaware of the alcoholism and abuse they would engage in later to set the stage for the beautiful families my grandparents would found in the fifties, consequently determined to build homes free from these vices.  Some of their descendants before me would also walk under these same trees as CSU students, long before RamCT or automated text messages on our phones from the school when the snow’s grown too deep for class.  I should ask Uncle Dan what the trees were like then.  I should ask Uncle Jim if this makes him sad.

I bet they weren’t concerned for the trees back then, they seemed strong.  They were probably at a more climbable height anyway.  So why is my generation the one to watch these trees fed piece-by-piece into noisy woodchippers as their dry branches fall on sidewalks and cars?  The next generation will probably just jump from stump to stump, uniquely aware of the blue sky that was hidden to us in the oval by a green patchwork canopy of leaves the size of your hand.  But they won’t be aware of the shade we had when we would play frisbee after work on summer days.

I guess eventually they will plant new trees to fight through the cold, dead roots that stretch a hundred feet underground, to establish a new network of life.  But for another fifty years kids will bike around them, not under them.  I imagine one or two of the old trees will survive, and kids will just think it’s a monstrosity because although it used to be surrounded by friends its size, now it stands out and is contrasted as huge beside the saplings.  The pictures on the CSU website will be of this tree.  Pamphlets and brochures show kids studying under it, amongst the little trees transplanted from some tree farm.  It’s like an anomaly, a living exception that would teach us as much as we could understand if it could talk.  Maybe someday I’ll walk by those trees with a young Raab of my own, to leave him here like I was left here, a wonderful part of life and an adventure I’m still enjoying.  I’ll tell him about what the trees looked like when I went here, we’ll talk about how nice it is in Fort Collins, and then I’ll hug him and hold on as tight as my Dad held onto me. I’ll pray for him to know God and to be courageous like Joshua.

When I return home, there will naturally be a void.  Kind of like the void the trees left when we cut them down.  But he’ll return on occasion, far from forgotten, unlike the trees.  I dramatize everything.  Music people are the worst at doing that.  Now I’m caused to remember that those trees are still there as we speak, even if they’re looking a little grey like the sky the last couple days.  No one’s cut them down yet.  I don’t have a son, praise God in Heaven, and  I’m actually the one who returns home, on occasion, to see my lovely parents.  Hmmm….life is good for me.

The character of God is different than trees, because even the oldest, most majestic trees we can think of can be destroyed from the inside by little beetles or mold or whatever.  They eventually topple over and we send them in pieces to wherever dead trees go to become paper.  I assume all trees get turned into paper when they die.  God is different though, because we can climb in His branches, build a treehouse amongst the strong limbs, and live in peace and childlikeness in His great comforting love, without the fear of anything bringing us down.  No beetles, fire, or irresponsible teenage drivers could bring down this great tree.  We’re safe, we’re warm and cared about.  I am sure that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:38-39) We’re safe amongst these branches.

If  there does come a day when I leave a little Raab kid who maybe looks a little bit like me, at this great university or some other one, I’ll tell him about trees, and about the ones in the oval, and about how God isn’t anything like them.  Because His beauty is something unaffected by seasons or fires or anything people do or even the way people see Him.  He is Himself and He’s unspeakably brilliant and we don’t understand Him and that’s why it’s entirely appropriate to worship Him with every second, every moment, and every single thought.  That’s the God I serve.  THAT is my soon coming King.  If you’re looking for me, I’m up in His branches, holding on as tightly as He held onto me.

I can’t get past my relationship with trees.  I live in a house made of what used to be trees.  The bed I sleep in was fashioned from a tree, bought by some great grandparent of mine.  All of my guitars and drums were once strong trees, birch, maple, spruce, ash.  The living trees of my city build a canopy over my head, starting from the time I walk down the (wooden) steps of my home and step onto the ground, where the leaves all crunch when I step on them.  Down the street, lined with cottonwoods and aspens, across an intersection of busy cars.  Trees don’t get near the train track, but as I cross over it, looking both ways out of habit, I wonder what it looked like here before trains and people cut into the landscape to build this city.  The trees stretch over my head as I keep walking and cross the oval, three old rows of different species that stood still through two world wars.

Putting out my pipe, I step onto a campus boldly self-proclaimed as “green”.  I don’t think we know anything about green, we think green means turning off the lights when we leave the house.  I think green is a color.  I also think green is beautiful, and smells like summer, and looks like when I was ten or so, planting rows of little pine trees with my dad somewhere in Elbert County, Colorado, by a house he built for us to live in.  I wonder how many of those trees are still alive.   This thought process brought to you by Patrick Watson and the Cinematic Orchestra.  Listen to “To Build a Home”.  ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjjc59FgUpg ) Then listen to it again.  Then call me and we’ll cry and talk about it.

Out in the garden where we planted the seeds
There is a tree as old as me
Branches were sewn by the color of green
Ground had arose and passed it’s knees

By the cracks of his skin I climbed to the top
I climbed the tree to see the world
When the gusts came around to blow me down
I held on as tightly as you held onto me

I think God put more of his character into trees than we realize.  They don’t move from season to season, they don’t stop being there.  We stop noticing them, but trees are the houses we live in, the chairs we sit in, the beds we sleep in, the tables we eat on.  In spring they bloom or release cotton to fill the air and glow in the afternoon sun.  All summer they grow green, we climb in them, and they give us shade.  In fall they light up and glow a different color on their way to winter.  Then they paint themselves white and sleep in colorlessness until spring.  Like God, we see them differently as we go from season to season, but we don’t see them move, so we don’t always think about them.  We only notice them when they signify the changing seasons.  Oh, notice your God, climb to to top of the tree.  When the wind comes to blow you down, hold on as tightly as He held on to you.

“Wait” she said. “Who are you?”

He stared at her quickly and without expression before swinging a knotty old baseball bat with all his might at the garage door, breaking the top off the bat as he connected it to the sheet metal. The air in the well lit warehouse rang with the sound of the collision for a moment as they stared at the inconsequential dent inthe garage door.

“The keys to the forklift were no good” He said to her, still analyzing how much more damage he imagined himself doing.

“So we’re stuck.”

“Yeah” He muttered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Stacks and stacks of worthless lumber filled the warehouse. Burgundy beams reached across the celing wall to wall, coming to a peak at the top only higher enough than the tops of the walls to allow for rain runoff.

She turned up the corner of her mouth in skepticism and looked up the tastelessly arranged shelves full of what used to be someone’s construction material.

“Uh, I’m Cory” he stuck out a dry, caloused hand to her.

“Carolyn” she replied dryly.

“I can’t belive we locked ourselfs in here. That was so stupid.” he scoffed. “We’re safe though”

“Ha. Have a nice stay then. I have people to get back to.” she got up and walked toward the back of the building, looking once or twice to her left and right as she passed through corridors of worthless lumber. She spotted no new ways to leave the building.

The forklift in the back had headlights for some reason, making the vehicle look angry from the front, like it had some kind of scowling eyes. The keys hung uselessly in the ignition. She turned them a few times but the forklift made no attempt to be alive.  An orange light on the dashboard blinked in the shape of an exclaimation point, communicating nothing.

Corey laid back on the cement, kicking sawdust up into the stale air.  With his tired eyes closed tightly, his singing started abruptly. His clean, untrained voice carried well through the room.”How deep the Father’s love for us…” Deep breath. “How vast, beyond all measure…”

Slumped over in the seat of the forklift, she lifted her head at the sound. “That he would give his only son, to make a wretch his treasure…”.

She wanted to be irritated by him, but the words made her brain work. The song made her think of better times.  No running from people.  No hiding in random places.  Standing in a congregation of believers singing a loud to each other.  That’s where the song was familiar from.  Now she was nostalgic and sad.

He kept his tune up, unconcerned that she might not be enjoying it.  She was enjoying it though, so she thought she should get out of the forklift and tell him that.  She grabbed the bar on the forklift above her head to swing out, but the bar was actually attached to the open door on the forklift that startled her as it swung down and into place.  She pulled her legs quickly inside the vehicle for fear of smashing them.

Cory, lying on the dusty ground, stopped singing when he heard her scream as the forklift door shut loudly.  Hands still sore from the fight he lost to the garage door, he pushed on the ground and sat up quickly “Everything okay over there?”  A moment’s pause.

“Yea…The door just shut itself when I tried to get out.”  He laid back down on the ground.  ”Keep singing though!”  He smiled when she said this.

Carolyn’s first reaction wasn’t to escape the forklift.  She knew she could get out.  Instead like a child she put her hands up on the rubber steering wheel, as if to guide the lifeless machine to do something useful.  Running her hands along the rim of the wheel, she brushed into the keys in the ignition, making them jingle.  It was irresistible not to turn them again.  The engine-start safety mechanism that required the door to be closed was satisfied, and no yellow exclamation mark protested as the motor coughed and stammered.

The headlights burst to life and lit up half the warehouse.  Dust particles in the air lit up like fireflies as they made their way through the beams of light on their to the ground from wherever they came from.  The engine, humming a happy note, drew Cory up from his back and over to the idling machine.

“You fixed it!”, he yelled at her.  She just laughed because she didn’t understand why it worked now and didn’t before.  Carolyn crawled out the little window, being a little person, and landed squarely on the ground beside the machine.  Cory had more difficulty getting into the forklift, but operated it expertly once he was in place.  She stood far out of the way as he navigated the vehicle awkwardly over to the garage door that defeated him earlier.  He slammed the forks into the thick sheet metal, just barely denting it.  It was unreasonably loud and took a few more runs at the door,  but the forks eventually pressed through to the other side.  She just stood and covered her ears as he mercilessly got his revenge for the broken bat.

From behind the wheel Cory pushed up on the little sticky rubber lever that raised the forks.  In his mind  he envisioned lifting the door lifting up smoothly on its tracks, making a gap between it and the ground.  They would then crawl under and be free.  The forklift tore big gashes in the metal until it reached a beam going across the door lengthwise.  Unlike the with the bat, where things went much differently than he imagined, it looked just like he expected.

Standing outside now, blinking in the light, Cory and Carolyn looked around at the afternoon.  They didn’t say anything for a bit as they took in the sunshine.  She looked back past the door and noticed for the first time the switch on the wall inside responsible for raising and lowering the garage door.  Nothing but a big green button and a big red button.

“Wait.” She said, running over and ducking under the door with the two big tears in its midsection.  She pushed the green button in and somewhere a motor growled as  it raised the door the rest of the way.  Cory turned his head to one side like a puppy, made an unrepeatable face, and stood in wonder that he had missed that. She laughed so hard she doubled over and leaned on the forklift, big white teeth smiling brightly between her lips.  A laughed overwhelmed him from inside and he fell to the ground, making the most of such a situation.  They had been locked in the warehouse for no more than a few hours, but it seemed even more ridiculous now that they could have been free at anytime were they more observant.

Walking together, they began to look for their other friends, probably hiding nearby.  The story would maybe bring them some joy.

Leaving the Christmas lights up year round provides an ongoing illusion of cheer and seasonal togetherness. I like the way that feels. As if tomorrow morning we’ll all come down the stairs in our pajamas to a glowing room full of things our parents bought for us without any expectation of repayment. But its August the 7th, and my parents live in a different town now. Maybe they would like the lights if they visited for some reason, but came at night so the braided green wires didn’t just look tacky draped around the room.

I dont ever want to miss a day with God. I always think of it. See our relationship is something precious and bright, and it isn’t an illusion of joy like Christmas lights in summer.

Once a day here at my job in college, at a $7-a-plate restaurant across an intersection from the University, the sun suddenly suspends itself right over the awning for a while and shoots through the window for about ten minutes in brilliant orange. Before it disappears behind the building across the street, it colors the whole restaurant and illuminates every dust particle on its way across the dining room and into my squinty eyes. When I had glasses, if they weren’t really clean when that time of day came around, all the fingerprints and scratches would come out in the direct sunlight. I would usually just take them off at this point.

He is more like that light to me. Whenever he comes around I am blinded and mesmerized by him. See he could become just something I come home to, something I’m not shocked to see like the summer Christmas lights in my living room that lost thier novelty in the spring. I need to keep making the most of every moment I have with him, and not grow into grown-up complacency. For he is a very constant friend to me and a failproof companion I cannot see but know very well as my rock and salvation.

That resturant will be gone someday, but as long as God holds back his wrath on the Earth, the sun will return to that place every evening, whether veiled by clouds or not. I want to see him like that everyday, blaring into my dark, wicked life with his brilliant light, making me cover my face and eyes in shame and unspeakable joy to see that I’m not half as bad as he is good!

I pray all the time that he will brightly blind the eyes of my generation in the same way so they can be as overwhelmed with his glory and goodness as I am.

The iTunes free single of the week is a hit-and-miss affair.  The good ones have been great and the bad ones have been deleted from my library halfway through play one.  There’s a band called “Owl City” that a number of my friends have talked about for a while.  I never listened to their music, and never formed an opinion on the band until last week.

My little sister, Hannah Grace, is more of a music junkie than I ever was at 15.  Her favorite bands include Copeland, Eisley, Jason Morant, and Coldplay.  I love all these bands.  At her age I still thought P.O.D. was a good band and U2 was boring.  Hannah tells me the other day, “JD, you need to listen to Owl City.”  I had downloaded “Fireflies” as the free download of the week but had irresponsibly not listened to it yet.  I gave it a whirl once and was not excited, it was cheesy and poppy.  I like cheesy poppy though, so on a second listen I was really enjoying the music.  It made me happy.  I listen to less happy music than sad music.  I need more happy music.

On that thought I bought the rest of the album on iTunes by faith.  All week in my car and in my house, I’ve had it cranked.  This guy, named Adam Young, does all the singing, beat making, and produced the album beside Matt Thessien from Relient K.    It sound really good.  That’s what always gets me about the record.  How is it so full and balanced?  The sound is entirely electric, probably just a collection of clever Logic files.  But combined with great vocals and catchy love song lyrics, occasionally singing God’s praise, the music has got me.  It’s bothersome.  I should not like such cheesy pop music.  I do though.  Postal Service vs. Mae.  I love it.  Listen to “Cave In” or “Umbrella Beach” off the newest album from the band, “Ocean Eyes”.  It’s great.  Thanks that’s all.

I have an ongoing, continuing, internal upheaval at the sound of the song “How He Loves” by John Mark McMillian.  It’s a spectacular, honest song about God’s love for us.  My favorite worship song ever, and maybe even favorite song ever.  I should just make it a category of posts in my blog, I’ve written so much about it.  If you haven’t listened to it, You Tube Kim Walker and Jesus Culture doing “How He Loves”.  It’s just one of many renditions of the song.

There’s a problem I have though with the hundreds of versions I’ve heard of this song.  So many people feel the need to edit out or change the lyric “Heaven meets Earth like a sloppy wet kiss”.  As if those lyrics were meant to be sexual or perverse in some way?

• David Crowder Band just released a verison of the song and made a big deal out of it, releasing a single. I expected Crowder to do something different and creative but instead it was basically the Jesus Cultue version in a studio without Kim Walker.  Plus they cleverly swapped “sloppy wet kiss” for “unforeseen kiss”.  Unforeseen kiss, besides not being the written lyrics to the song, is something that makes no sense.  There was nothing unforeseen about Jesus’ sacrifice for us, his redeeming us, or his coming return to save us.  It was prophesied 2000 years in advance and when he came there was no mystery as to who he was.  Not unforeseen.  The lyrics, while being “church safed” have lost thier power.  Jesus didn’t “church safe” anything he said.
• My church back home does the song now and then, and they change “sloppy wet kiss” into “the holiest kiss”.  Which is a little better, at least making sense.  Still I think it’s weak and denies the song it’s brilliant imagery that has caused so many to turn.  God’s love for us is clearly that graphic.  You aren’t Weird Al Yankovich, don’t change lyrics to a song you didn’t write.
• I’ve even heard of a couple churches banning the song from their worship services for the sake of not offending anyone.  This is better, in a way, than butchering the lyrics, but is still a sad way to miss out on the power of this song.  It’s the raw honesty in the message of “How He Loves” that has caused the song, through God, to touch so many.  Lord knows I needed to hear every lyric of the song two years ago when it changed the way I thought.  I STILL get goosebumps every time I hear it anywhere.  There are churches who, for fear, will deny their congregations that in a cooperate setting for the sake of not being visual and graphic in a song.  Evey member of that church, bar the young ones, has experienced a sloppy wet kiss from someone they love, like spouses and fiances.  They can tell you it’s a beautiful, heart-melting thing.  How much more is the love of God a sloppy wet kiss to our lonely souls than the kiss of another person to our lips!

So that was my rant.  Sorry to the people and churches I directly called out if you come across this blog somehow.  I don’t think you’re a holier church for “playing it safe”.  Steer clear of Song of Soloman in your services and check out Hillsongs 4 Kidz if you need some new worship material for your tender-eared congregations.