I forget to thank God for my eyes.

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.

There must be some mistake.

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.

Hallway Of Leaves.

I’m in a constant state of questioning my whole life.  There is almost nothing I hold on to tight enough not to leave at the drop of a hat if God’s will suddenly came clear.  Nothing in the world would bring me more joy right now than to hear a voice suddenly in my room, “JD, this is God.  You are called to missions, go to (insert country)” or “JD, this is God.  Music is what I have for you. It glorifies me and you have my blessing in it.”  I would instantly clear everything else in my life out of the way to run headlong into God’s spoken plan.

 

But that’s not how this works, is it?  Instead I struggle through his will for me.  Through expensive and exhausting trial and error I find out in little ways what his plan looks like.  My lack of faith is made clear in this, I am afraid of my future.  I’m terrified that I’m gonna mess it up.  I look up from my bench in the Lory Student Center food court at hundreds of other kids who are working like crazy to build futures for themselves.  They bustle about, eating Panda Express as they highlight portions of lecture notes they took this morning.  Full of ambition, full of motivation.  Looking down at a Grilled Stuft Burrito (Taco Bell’s greatest work IMO), I battle through thoughts like “They’re probably way ahead of me”, and “What am I even doing here?”

 

I want to be excited and ambitious about what I’m doing.  I want to be overwhelmed by it.  I want it to feel like music feels.  Music is inside and outside me.  All around.  It makes me so excited, it gives me a feeling nothing else does.  In late August this year I blogged about my shameless musical soundtrack, a principal I stand firmly behind.  I need my education to be something of that degree or else it will always just fall to music as a “back up plan”.  Not okay!! But God is good and he says in Jeremiah 29:11 that his plan for me is good.  I need to put more faith in that.  Really.

 

Struggling through God’s plan for my life now will leave me more satisfied and more thankful when it finally becomes clear.  When I’m settled with a job, a house, and a family, I know I will look back and be glad that everything happened the way it did.  Yes it’s hard on my mind right now, but that will prove worth it later.

 

Happy Thanksgiving, by the way!

Aim for the floor.

If you know anything about me, you know that I play drums.  I play a lot of drums.  I might not be the most flashy or the most technical, but I am a drummer void of shame.  The satisfaction achieved from a heavy kick and snare pattern in the context of worship music or creative secular music is not just a feeling, it’s a spiritual thing that comes from my chest and the heart inside of it.  I love to hammer through a song hung deep in the pocket.  I love to punch my kick drum and feel it resonate through the room, especially when well mic’d.  I love the whip-crack cymbal technique.  Keep ‘em low and flat with plenty of space to swing.  I only need like two of them, but they should be big and well-matched.  Say “ZBT” or “B8″ and I will punch your jaw.  The most satisfying part is a good snare.  My snare is 7.5″ deep and made of solid Birch.  I installed a 42-strand snare bed just recently, and now the instrument sounds entirely different than before.  It’s all low and growly, a very warm, controlled sounding snare.  It sounds like love to me.

 

I write all this to say that I am very excited for ONE this year.  Every year at CSU, all the ministries that want to get together for an extravagant night of loud, joyful worship.  Last year we had about 600 kids, three bands, and two speakers.  I was blessed to be in the the band that closed out the night.  This year we have consolidated to only one band, although many ministries have joined us that did not participate last year.  It will be even bigger, and we will have much less practice time than last year with a less firmiliar band than before.  But I am thrilled.  We spent our whole first practice seeking God and praying together last night.  The feeling was wonderful.  We have already began to unite our ministries in heart!  I am incredibly excited to drum again this year.  The set is two hours long, with lots of time for Reason expressions.  I am so excited.  Our God is here and he is a glorious King.

Physics it is then.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have decided to declare a physics major.  It will surely be tough, but oh-so rewarding.  I’m gonna spend the next few years of my life learning about how the world works, and I’m excited to learn about God’s amazing mind through all of it.  This will take prayer and diligence, but I’m prepared.  That’s all!