You were a million years of work.

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.)

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.

Needle and thread

This afternoon am jealous of Anthony, and he is certainly not jealous of me.

I don’t have anything profound or even worthwhile to say on the matter, but God bless the Jarret family and God bless the lives this will change.

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!