My Exit, Unfair.

I’ve been enjoying the blog “Stuff Christians Like” quite a bit lately.  Its a cleverly satirical, unchurchy analysis of Christians and how we live.  It’s moving and hilarious.  This most recent post, however, wasn’t as funny as it was convicting to me.  

 

You see, “Stuff Christians Like”  has become a lot more popular than the writer ever expected, with thousands and thousands of people reading it everyday.  The author, a man named Jon, is always trying to deny that God is doing something through his blog, much like I deny that God is actually doing something through me, my music, my day job, or my relationships.  Anyway, he quoted a section of  The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield, talking about the struggle that artists of various types have with making their work their life and fully using their gifts.  This was convicting to me:

 

The Artist’s Life
Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action.

Do it or don’t do it.

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

(This part spoke to me the most…)

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution.

Give us what you’ve got.

 

 

I Love it.  Tell me what you think.

I don’t want to talk about You like You’re not in the room.

When a loudspeaker vibrates, it pushes the air around it in a specific way so as to give it frequency and amplitude.  When you “hear” music, it’s because the air in the room is moving and oscillating around you.  Your ears pick up the movement in the air and your brain tells you about it through some cryptic electronic pulses, right?  That’s not what it feels like, though.  Something in your spirit moves and churns as the music moves through you and inside you, giving you a feeling.  If this were not true there would be no “music”, only noise.

 

I wonder sometimes if our worship is like this to God.  If it’s noise and not music. We spend a lot of time on our tone and our technique to make a sound that pleases our ears.  We then put a catchy melody over it and sing it to our friends at church.  We call this our “worship”.  At the end of the service, after the message, you’ll hear the speaker commonly say  something like “I’d like to invite the band up to lead us in worship as I close in prayer.”  What does that even mean?  

 

Apparently I lead worship now for a college church of 250-300 kids.  This is a recent development in my life and I’m pumped about it, but I don’t know if what I bring to the table as far as a “worship leader” is what these people need.  To me music is still a sound.  I still give music an absolute value based on how much my spirit likes it when it comes into my brain through my ear canals.  I guess everyone does that.  

 

Singing is still new to me.  I have this fakey push-the-high-end style of singing that shows I’ve never had training.  My pitch is unstable and I think I’m probably hard to sing with.  I get nice compliment after nice compliment on my singing every week after service, and I just want to look at these gracious people and say “You’re really nice, thank you.  But seriously I have no idea what I’m doing.  I play drums.”  I cannot wait to get to a place where I sing from my heart to God like I’m looking right at him.  Like it’s something that will make my insides collapse if I don’t do it.  I want people to read that desperation on my face and in my voice and I want them to follow me and belt it out like they mean it, to a God who really meant it when he gave his life.  That’s what I think a “worship leader” does.

 

I don’t want the sound I push into the diaphragm of a microphone, though a maze of cables, and into the air through some muddy JBL’s to be a noise to people.  I don’t even want it to be a “good”sound.  I want it to pierce into hearts and move minds out of complacency.  I want it go right through my friends and into their spirits, causing them to cry out to the God who is mighty to save.  I want it to be a wonderful listening experience, yes, but I am more concerned about it reaching that soft place in them that is full of gratitude and compassion, causing them to worship right into God’s own ears.

 

Singing along mindlessly to a worship song is noise, don’t do that anymore

 

Crying out from your heart in desperation and thankfulness is worshiping God.  

 

I pray all the time that I, as some new worship leader, will cause the second to happen inside my friends.  I want anthems of praise to our God to ring in our heads for days and days, mechanically bringing up feelings of adoration and thankfulness even long after the set is over.  For my inheritance Lord, help me lead your people into a beautiful romance with you through a clever, creative soundtrack of praise.

Love Is Only For Poets.

My blogging has been lacking at best lately.  All I’ve got for you tonight is a list of fantastic music I’ve been listening to lately.  The list is album, band. 

 

1. “On Your Side” by Magnet
2. “Oracular Spectacular” by MGMT
3. “Your Love Never Fails” by Chris Quilala, Kim Walker, and Melissa How 
4. “Catch For Us The Foxes” by mewithoutYou
5. “Close To Paradise” by Patrick Watson
6. “Fall” EP by Jon Foreman

 

This is the music that’s provided the soundtrack to the last couple weeks.  ”Your Love Never Fails” might be one of the most sincere, moving, and most creative worship albums I’ve heard.  Kim Walker is amazing and her music gives me chills.

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.

I have a shameless soundtrack.

I’ve just recently noticed how important the soundtrack to my life is to me.  You know what I’m talking about.  The songs that are always in your head.  The songs that make you feel something wherever you are.  Songs like “Reset” by MuteMath, or songs like “At Your Feet” by Jason Morant.  They play all the time and they give you a certain walk when you go somewhere.  

 

My soundtrack is shameless.  I BLARE music in my mind.  All the time.  Everywhere I go.  Sometimes it’s music of my own creation.  Never recorded.  Sometimes never even played.  But it exists in my head for God and I to enjoy.  Other times I’m looping a guitar part I’m working on for a song the band’s playing on Sunday.  For example I’m trying to conquer the guitar solo in “Walk the World” by Charlie Hall for this worship night we’re having on Friday.  The solo is GREAT but way above my level of guitar playing.  Today in Calc class my teacher was wearing a MuteMath shirt, so naturally the whole lecture I was re-playing MM shows I had been to in my head.  The intensity, the creativity, the light-smashing.

 

Music is better to me than any drug.  It’s a high that never goes away.  This is why it is imperative to listen to good, wholesome music that honors God and pushes the limits of human creativity and expression.  It becomes your soundtrack.  It becomes you.

And my song will be I love You…

Tonight I was watching the olympics at my friends Dru and Chris’ house.  Sean Johnson had just been awarded the gold medal in gymnastics at age 16 and was holding back tears of joy.  An interview came a bit later, in which her trainer talked about how when she came to his gym in West Des Moines, Iowa at age 6, he asked her “How good do you want to be?”  Ten years later her answer to him had become a reality as she stood on the podium with a gold medal around her neck, hearing the Star Spangled Banner play over the sound system in a gigantic Olympic gym in communist China.  

 

Playing electric guitar came into my mind, like it tends to, and I thought to myself. “If at her age she had  developed to be as good as she set out to be, through intense training and dedication, I also can be as good as I want to if I do the same.” Of course I didn’t SAY those words to myself, but that was the thought process.  So here’s the truth.  Let me get it out there.  I want to be a really good guitar player.  Like Johnny Greenwood good.  Like Omar Rodríguez-López good. Like Michael Guy Chislett good.  Here is why I want to be that good at electric guitar.  Honestly and sincerely I do not want my talent or inability to play to hinder my creativity in worship.  If I hear it in my head and feel it in my soul I want to be able to communicate it through my instrument unhindered.  

 

It’s selfish because I want the satisfaction of being able to seamlessly play the things I hear in my head that I think are great.  It’s selfish because it means a lot to ME how good I am.  It’s honestly not to impress anyone.  No Bull.  I’m not concerned with what you think about my talent or lack thereof.  I need to know that I’m good enough.  It’s selfish because I want to be talented enough to make a living of playing guitar so I don’t have to waste my time doing something else I don’t care about.  I would spend all day at even the best desk job thinking about playing electric guitar.

 

But here’s why it isn’t selfish.  The biggest reason for my wanting to be a fantastic electric guitar player is that I want to communicate my love to the father and I know of no better way to do so, set aside giving my life for his glory.  In my situation, the passion I have in my heart is music.  Not uncommon.  When I try to run from it I get unstable and cranky.  It’s my love.  It’s my outward love to God.  My life’s a lovesong to you.  If I can make a sound that comes from my whole being, if I can make noises and pick the notes that move you, then I am all I need to be as a musician.  If I’m all I need to be as a musician, than I can easier worship with all that I am as a person.  Then it can bless other people, too.  But honestly for nobody else, if I can make sounds that come directly from my love and God is blessed directly, than I have found my portion in life.  My song, my sound will be “I love you.”  I think that sound is crazy and loud.  I think that sound is unbridled and unheard of.  I think it sounds like home.  I think it sounds like hope.  Maybe I am arrogant, but I am not arrogant in this.  Christ is worth my whole life’s efforts.  I would lay it all down and seek after music if it were his will for me.  It may or may not be his will for me, but it burns in my heart every day.  

 

“How good do you want to be?”  I’m a six year old right now in the world of guitar playing, not terribly talented, but being trained in my passion one step at a time.  Ten years from now I want to be standing on a podium receiving the enormous reward of my work.  The biggest reward possible in the world of worship and electric guitar playing.  The reward of chains being broken, lives being healed, eyes being opened, and Christ being revealed on a massive scale wherever the Lord chooses to put me.  If my podium is a stage on a tour, in my little home church , in a studio booth, in a local venue, or in a staduim packed with youth desperate for God, I believe I will see my efforts rewarded.  Because I have said “For my inheritance give me the lost!”  

 

This is why I want to be a really good electric guitar player.  Does that make sense?

We are his portion and he is our prize.

I just woke up from the ceremonial nap I take in between shifts at work everyday.  Today I dreamed briefly that we were having music practice in a small stadium-seating auditorium that looked like it wasn’t in a church.  It was just a practice run of “He Loves Us”, but the room was packed with people of all ages worshiping from their hearts.  One minute I was holding a guitar, looking out from the stage at these people with a sense of satisfaction, success, and hope for them, and the next minute I inhaled deep and fast as clicked back into reality and woke up startled with drool on my face.  I was suddenly somewhere in between where I wanted to be and where I actually was, with the images still fresh in my mind.  Somewhere in there I had a few thoughts about the way these people were worshiping.

• The people were worshipping individually.  Although there were a ton of people in the room, each one of them felt like they were before God on their own, bringing their own sacrifice of praise into the house of the Lord. No one was worshipping because every one else was feeling it.
• The people were worshiping out of relief and joy that God himself actually loved them, like the song says.  It was genuine, raw, and so joyful.  Do we sing the song that way?
• The people were of many different ages.  There was no segregation.  The music was loud, but no one was bothered, much less OFFENDED like at my church.  If volume was an issue to anyone, it certainly wasn’t a big enough issue to stop worshiping and be irritated.  It was God’s worship, so what issues were there? What issues could there have been?  It was God we were worshiping.  I wasn’t stressed about my tone or the monitor level or the drummer’s tempo or the people’s reaction.  It was WORSHIP. Nothing short.  If there were imperfections, nobody cared because they were singing “We are his portion and he is our prize” and it was TRUE, and that was AMAZING.
• The people were there during the practice.  It wasn’t during the 30 minute designated worship time.  They all showed up because there were people getting together to practice worshiping.  This was apparently a good enough reason to come and worship with them.  Imagine if people were so pumped to worship God that they would show up to practice just to get some more.  Not just crazy church lady with tambourines and flags, but the majority of the congregation?
• I was filled with hope.  Because as many people as were there, there were that many people who I KNEW were kingdom bound and enthralled to think about the way that He loves us.  I was happy for them because I KNEW they didn’t have time to maintain their regrets!  Wish I was like that.
• We were definitely not in a church.  That’s neat.  It felt like some public event center or something. Means the event was too big for someone’s church.  That or the event wasn’t put on by a church.  How nice that we don’t have to go to the temple anymore to worship.

He is Jealous for Me.

Tonight we had a worship service in my town, Fort Complacent. We called it “The Vespers Service”, and I’m still not sure what a Vesper is (maybe someone can enlighten me?).  The night was really fun.  Our worship leader’s dad, Grant Pahlau, has been playing guitar for probably like 30 years.  At some point in his career as a guitarist, he came into ownership of this amazing 1965 Fender Mustang.  A really cool and unique sounding guitar (check out the band Mew to hear one).  So basically he let me play it, and I really loved it.  There were a lot of times where I couldn’t figure out how to switch the pickups to get a sound I wanted, but there were moments where the guitar’s character just jumped out all over the place.  So fun.

Another interesting part of the night was when we did “He Loves Us”.  For the first time in my history I got to lead a song for college kids, and I feel like this was a really good song to get started with.  I pulled this song off of Sean’s iDisk a few months ago and it’s been in my head since, redefining the way I think about God’s love for me.  We did an easy simple brushes-violin-acoustic-JD’s slide/delay/nonsense version of the song that went really well, and a LOT of people responded to it, just as I had prayed for.  I got a few warm compliments on my singing and leading, and left feeling really warm and loved.  Not just by Fo Co friends either, I really really know that I am loved by Almighty God, and that is irrefutable evidence to his extravagant affections for me.  Get some.

After the song was done and the atmosphere was unusually saturated with worship, I felt as though I had some kind of wonderful chemical in my blood making me feel amazing.  I haven’t kissed a girl yet, but I imagine that this feeling was better…because girls get jealous and it stops being fun.  I know for sure that HE is jealous for me, and that feels way different.

Worship with Stephanie Dorman, Monopoly with the Bro’s

So the Benefit concert was awesome. We were scrambling to find chairs for everyone to sit in, and we were probably over fire code. Glorious. Bryan Umphenour was brilliant and Johnathan Stark was a hoot. I enjoyed Jered’s music, but honestly every song was just kind of OK. That is, until he whipped out “I’m coming your way”, which was sensational. So the team raised a ton of support, and I wound up having the honor of getting to converse with two of my idols, Jared Henderson and Chad Tipps. Real men of genius. As most of my friend will agree to, I’ve been lusting after Jared’s snare drum tone since I went to the MILL the first time a while back.

I also had the joy of leading worship this morning with the lovely Stephanie Dorman (see picture on poster below), also of the MILL. Through a random series of events Dan Pahlau, the normal leader of the college group (called Real Faith) at my church, got sick and basically just asked Steph to lead after her awesome set last night. We are friends of hers from outside last night’s show and she gladly agreed. The music went well, my guitar sounded pretty great, and she effortlessly sang my heart into a crush with her. Ok that isn’t really true, she’s a good three years older as it turns out. But it was good enough singing to distract me from worship at one or two moments of the set, not unusual for a very (unofficially) ADD drummer. Good morning.

As of now I retire to blog after a four and a half hour nap. We play Monopoly at eight. Life is pretty good sometimes.