PEACE OVER ME

The highest form of earthly freedom comes when we accept and settle into the reality that we cannot expect things to be okay.

I'm embarrassed to say this is more of a recent realization for me than an old one. Here in America, I think we have been hyper-conditioned to think things are mostly solvable or answerable. Marriage not working? Throw it out. Car not as nice as the next guys'? Upgrade. Want to watch that movie? Instant download. Over time, this gives our brains the impression that "there's an app for that."

On a drive home a few years ago, God broke up the fallow ground of my heart and deeply showed me that I would not be whole on this side of eternity. Whether I was conditioned culturally (probably) or pridefully (certainly), I sort of assumed that I was due good health. But God doesn't promise healing by our definitions. In fact, he might even prescribe further suffering as the treatment. This shattered my subtle prosperity paradigm.

It's good for us broken creatures to truly reconcile with the extent of our brokenness; to feel broken. Self-sufficiency is an illusion. Don't you want to know the truth about reality, sketch its real dimensions? Ego recoils in disgust. The world, the flesh, and the devil are always trying to disguise the real nature of things with tools like distraction, division, and pride. Believing you are a temporarily embarrassed billionaire is way better than admitting you're a sinful wretch. Rather than reveal a karmic state (as if we could turn it all around with good behavior!), suffering reminds us of our frame. our need. Only Christ can meet it.

This is what 'Peace Over Me" is about: everything is not okay but all shall be well.

One of my late grandma's favorite hymns was "In the Garden."

I come to the garden alone

while the dew is still on the roses

and the voice i hear falling on my ear

the Son of God discloses

And he walks with me

and he talks with me

and he tells me I am his own

and the joy we share as we tarry there

none other has ever known

The song reminds me of what we were created for. We were created to walk with God in the cool of the day and spend the rest of it working to make things beautiful.

I was also inspired by Wendell Berry's poem "Marriage" (1968), written for his wife, Tanya:

How hard it is for me, who live
in the excitement of women
and have the desire for them
in my mouth like salt. Yet
you have taken me and quieted me.
You have been such light to me
that other women have been
your shadows. You come near me
with the nearness of sleep.
And yet I am not quiet.
It is to be broken. It is to be
torn open. It is not to be
reached and come to rest in
ever. I turn against you,
I break from you, I turn to you.
We hurt, and are hurt,
and have each other for healing.
It is healing. It is never whole.

While my song is not about marriage, it is rebellious against idealistic unions. It's about our destiny to always have expectations unmet in other people, to always struggle with sin on earth, to recognize grief like an old friend instead of kicking against it.

As I crafted "Peace Over Me", I wanted it to be an anthem of surrender, but not a universal one. This song is for people who are ready to admit they may not be healed but are still whole.

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WAITING

2017. I'm standing in a cramped resort bathroom fixing my makeup, getting ready to go out to dinner after a long afternoon tanning on Myrtle Beach. Pausing my artwork, I cue up last week's sermon from my church at home. I'm living on sermons these days, trying to pull the Gospel into my everyday. In my memory, the sermon is titled something like 'Now and Not Yet' but I doubt that's true.

Kevin is preaching on the lynchpin of the Christian worldview: incarnation. As I unscrew the cap on my mascara, he connects advent to eschatology: the first incarnation of Jesus' birth and the second incarnation of his coming return. He explains that our whole life is lived between these two points in time, these decisive inbreaks of a holy God into His own bent universe. This reality provides the existential tension we feel, the reason why there is healing but not wholeness, sanctification but not glorification...and yet we already have these things. Things are not okay, are becoming okay, are okay. This idea stopped me in my tracks.

We want to understand our frame so badly. "Why am I here?" "What should I do with my life?" "Are we alone in the universe?" We want coordinates of being. Christians at least acknowledge an origin point and a creation mandate that gives us something to do, but we get more caught up in the mechanics than we do the implications. "Where are we going?" We need a God over both Alpha and Omega.

Chaos gives us the impression that we are free floating in filaments and voids, pinned only to the coughs of nihilism and absurdity. It wrenches control from our hands and dashes our expectations on the rocks. A friend of mine once opined that COVID-19 sped everything up. If you started dating someone during social isolation, odds are your relationship hit the six-month emotional intimacy mark at three weeks. If you feared loneliness, social distancing broke you. If you feared death, those 3 am night sweat thoughts were now 3 pm Lysol grocery wipe-down panic attacks in your kitchen.

Center a global pandemic between the two incarnational points. When the news is full of bad things and the temptation to doomscroll grows, I often wonder to myself, "How do people do this without hope?"

There are Christians who think they have hope but what they truly have is ephemeral wishfulness. Or their hope is to be plucked out of the world instead of being plunged into the heart of its redemption. The second incarnation becomes more of a secondary benefit to the sci-fi creature feature.

But real hope is incarnational, COVID was super weird because COVID was super real. We couldn't conceptualize it into a metaphor, pull it into the ether and out of the physical world. Disease is undeniably creaturely. It was a reckoning in several ways. Forced rest showed us how much we've neglected it. Forbidden gatherings of the saints showed us how much we crave simple worship and the word of God preached in physical earshot.

I wrote "Waiting" the day after lockdowns went into effect in New York. I had just gotten off the phone with a friend of mine who I had assumed would handle such a crisis pretty well. But this person was shattered by it, plunged into depression and hopelessness. And by contrast, the longing for a redeemed world in both of us became that much stronger. That old sermon came back to my mind.

Around that time, another friend made a passing comment to me about memories being stored like chords (more than one line of memory played at once upon remembrance). I can't remember the source, and neither can she, but it stuck in my creative consciousness like fly paper - I included the phrase in some shape or form in a lot of my art those days. But I love the way it implies that everything in our experience is fodder for God's handiwork. We experience things a note at a time. Only in hindsight can we see the chords.

Yesterday, tomorrow, and today, He is our anchor among the filaments and voids, the Rosetta stone to the eternity God placed in our hearts. Our hope is real hope in the here and now and not yet. "Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow - blessings all mine with ten thousand beside." Great is Thy faithfulness.

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PRAYER OF YOUR LOVE

Some songs (like "True Dream") take a long time to write. Others seem to spool out in mere minutes. I wrote Prayer of Your Love the same day I penned "Love Somebody" for my band The Local Hang-Ups. I often wonder why that day was so full of inspiration, and the only thing I can think of is that I came to the table with time and low expectations. It was the early days of COVID - literally days into lockdown - and I had plenty of both in my world.

At the time, I was reading the theology of Charles Williams. The lesser-known Oxford Inkling, Charles Williams has been a huge influence on both my imagination and my spirituality. You can read more about Williams and my views on him in this piece I wrote for Ekstasis Magazine. I was particularly interested in Williams' concept of romantic theology.

I've always been drawn to the relational dynamic between Gomer and Hosea in the book of Hosea. A dramatic metaphor for the relationship between God and Israel, the book of Hosea also lends a great image of the human heart's difficulty in receiving and reciprocating God's love. In the story, God tells Hosea that he will marry Gomer, a local prostitute who wants nothing to do with him, as a demonstration of God's pursuit of the rampant, unreciprocating Israel. Gomer doesn't love Hosea and ditches him all the time. Hosea has to go out many times to bring her home.

Seems it always takes a push and a shove to get me walking back home...

There's something to be said for the holy fool here, too. They say the definition of insanity is to commit the same error again and again. If we don't want God, why is our need for him so irresistible to us? If our reasons against believing in a loving, all-powerful God are so good and obvious, why does humanity still want to believe? The cost of discipleship in Jesus Christ is so high. Why do we press on toward the mark? As Chesterton said, the riddles of God are better than the solutions of man. To be a Christian means to be a fool in the eyes of the world. Great joy comes in admitting you are a fool for the truth.