Archive for the 'Think about...' Category
Maybe I should review the entire album “five score and seven years ago” at some point, but today I’ll just focus on the one song that really means a lot to me. “Come right out and say it” is about honesty. It’s also about a friendship that’s breaking up. Could be the sad end to a romantic love story… but it doesn’t have to be. It could happen between friends… unfortunately I know what I’m talking about. So one of them “beats around the bush”, never quite saying what it is that’s going on. And the other one notices. People are that way. Sometimes it’s hard to even say what it is that’s bothering you. It can seem so insignificant that you’d feel strange even mentioning it. Or it can be that big, life-altering secret that is getting between you and the other person, but you don’t want them to know. You may want to keep the friendship going, but it’s the silence that destroys more than it preserves. “Thought you were being so kind by keeping your mouth sealed shut rather than just opening it up” - it often doesn’t work that way. When it last happened to me, it didn’t work. I knew that something was wrong, long before it even started getting close to the surface. I started to try and figure out what it was - if I had done something wrong, if it was anything that I could fix. “And I try to guess what goes on in your head. Cause in your mind I just might find all those things you left unsaid“.
Sometimes it’s better to just come out with the truth - I know I was hurt way more by the silence than by what came out many months later. At least now I knew… some things I could do something about, others were completely outside of my control. It really wasn’t my fault after all, but I spent months thinking it was. This song got me through some of that time… more than once I wanted to sing it out loud to the other person: “Why don’t you come right out and say it. Even if the words are going to hurt we’re better off this way. Why don’t you come right out and say what I know you’re thinking anyway“.
Song: Come right out and say it
Artist: Relient K
Album: Five score and seven years ago
Technorati : CCM, christian, friendship, honesty, lyrics, music, truth
Wow, the CD containing this song hasn’t even been released and I’m already writing about it - after several months of silence, mostly due to too much other work. But “East to West” really caught my attention. I had the privilege of hearing Casting Crowns perform this song live back in June at the Frenzy festival in Edinburgh/Scotland and now that they released it as the first single from their new album “The Altar and the Door”, they put it up on their MySpace page for people to listen to it. It’s fantastic and I like the music just as much as I like the lyrics.
The song addresses something that I know quite well - a disconnection between knowing and feeling. I know Jesus died for me and I know that through Him I am without sin. But it’s often seems like such an impossible thing that my feelings can’t quite keep up with my knowledge. And so there’s always the fear of backsliding into old ways, where the “old man” that has died in me comes back to life because it seems impossible for my heart to understand the magnitude of what He has done. “But today I feel like I’m just one mistake away from you leaving me this way…” is a feeling I know all too well. Don’t get me wrong, being a little bit careful and trying not to sin is a good thing - but being scared of making just one mistake is something that clearly Jesus doesn’t want us to be. “Can’t live by what I feel, but by the truth Your work reveals…” - that’s what it’s about. Our emotions and feelings are more often than not of very little help when we want to follow Jesus in every situation of our lives. “Time and time again your truth is drowned out by the storm I’m in” - if we believe the feelings that overwhelm us in the storm, then it gets a lot more difficult than it should be.
So what can we do? Nothing! We can’t do anything - but Jesus can. We know that He has removed our sin from us “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12) and all the song is really asking for is for Jesus to show us just how far that really is. We need to understand that we cannot easily be reached by our old sin - it’s gone and Jesus hung on the Cross to get between us and that old sin. Because that’s how far the east is from the west: “from one scarred hand to the other”!
Song: East to West
Artist: Casting Crowns
Album: The Altar and the Door
Technorati : CCM, Casting Crowns, East to West, Jesus, christian music, lyrics
It’s been a while since I found the time to sit down and share my thoughts about a song with you and I’m sorry about that, but life just got in the way. Anyway, yesterday something reminded me of a song that seems like a good match for this week leading up to Easter, as we remember the suffering of Christ in the days before He gave His life for us on the cross.
Ginny Owens’s “This Road” is a song that first and foremost reminds me of a very lonely time. Back in 2003, when I was living in London, part of a team where I was the only male single under 50 (and I was under 30 back then), I often felt “a million miles away from anything familiar”, so that opening line of the song touched me very deeply. The first verse quite accurately sums up my feelings of loneliness and the question in the chorus, although I knew the answer in a way, was my question at times as well - “Why this road, why this way and this load?”. And as I was still thinking this is the perfect song to nurture my self-pity, the second verse hit me right where it hurts. Ginny Owens so perfectly puts all that into perspective as she forces our eyes away from ourselves and to Christ and His suffering - and the loneliness that He felt. Wheneever I hear this song, it reminds me that whatever I go through, whatever I experience, be it good or bad, He already knows and He has done it before me.
No, my loneliness didn’t go away when I listened to this song. But still it made me feel better because it reminded me that I’m not the only one who experiences loneliness. And it reminded me that I have a God and Savior who know exactly what loneliness is like. Not a distant being, but a God who came down to this earth to live as a human being, capable of all human emotion and willing to go through everything that I could ever imagine. What is a little loneliness compared to that? And yet I know it matters to Him, as it did back then. “I don’t have to understand to believe that You know why…” - that helped me then and it still helps me now when I face situations I find hard to understand. So far, looking back at the situations I didn’t understand in the past, they all make sense now. And I know that I can simply trust Him to know why in the future as well… because who knows when He will send me onto the next road “a thousand miles away from anything familiar”…
Song: This Road
Artist: Ginny Owens
Album: Something More
Technorati : CCM, Christ, Easter, Jesus, loneliness, lyrics, suffering
I must begin this article with an admission: I have never heard the original song. The only version I know is the much debated SmashUps version where it was mixed with DC Talk’s “Jesus Freak” (I think it’s excellent, but others disagree). But this is about the lyrics and not about the music anyway, so it doesn’t really matter if I have heard the original song, a remix or even just read the lyrics somewhere.
What is the topic of the song? There are a few options and I am not sure what the original intention was when it was written. It could be about an ex-boyfriend or about someone who has been a bad influence on someone else’s life. It probably is about all those things, but for me it’s a song about how the power of the devil has been broken and how that changes everything.
“I know everything about you” - yes, the devil has been revealed and his disguises no longer work. We are better off without him - he’s been dismissed. Through Jesus his power has been broken and he can no longer hold us in slavery. He will still try to “hold me with a lock and key” and to deceive me and “cover my eyes so I cannot see” - but we already know that in Jesus there is victory and we don’t need to be afraid anymore. And when we are facing temptation, that knowledge is something we can hold on to in the face of adversity. We don’t need to be afraid - the devil may be strong, but Jesus is stronger and his victory cannot be reversed. And that’s why the devil is so “over, over, over…”.
Song: Dismissed
Artist: Zoegirl
Album: Life
Author: ?
Technorati : Jesus, Zoegirl, christian, devil, dismissed, lyrics, smashups, song
In the first ever “think about…” article on this site, I already mentioned that I admire Casting Crowns for their ability to catch me off guard with truth about our christian lives. Of course there’s more than one song in which they do just that, so today let’s have a look at “Stained Glass Masquerade”, another one of these songs that take a good look at the state that many of our churches and people in them are in.
Written from the perspective of someone who notices his weaknesses and failings, it asks the question if there really is nobody else who experiences the same things. “Cause when I take a look around, everybody seems so strong. I know they’ll soon discover that I don’t belong.” Do you know that feeling? Looking at everybody else and they seem not to have all the same problems that you are struggling with every day? I sometimes get that - not in my church in general, but when I’m with certain people. And I also notice that I react the exact same way the “narrator” in the song does: “So with a painted grin, I play the part again, so everyone will see me the way that I see them”. I hide behind a mask, behind a fake smile and the pretension that I’m doing just as fine as they are. The problem is, once we all start to do that, there’s not much left of what being a Christian is all about. If everything’s fine, do we still need Jesus? If we lie to each other about being fine, is it because we’re afraid that nobody cares if it’s not? Or that we are a failure who really doesn’t belong in the church, maybe because we’re not spiritual enough and something must be wrong with us?
That’s probably the toughest question in the song: “Would your arms be open or would you walk away? Would the love of Jesus be enough to make you stay?”. So, would it? It’s a question that we really need to ask ourselves every day. Is it possible in our churches to be open about having problems? Do we extend a helping hand to those around us who are struggling? Are we prepared to show the love of Jesus to those who are having difficulty living according to His will? Or is all that we are prepared to do to come down on them with laws and criticism and to make them feel even worse about themselves? Let us be prepared to have open arms and to share the love. Let us be prepared to leave our masks behind and be the people we really are. It may be a shock at first… but God’s love is greater than any faults that we may have to admit to.
Song: Stained Glass Masquerade
Artist: Casting Crowns
Album: Lifesong
Author: Mark Hall, Nichole Nordeman
Technorati : Casting Crowns, Christianity, Jesus, ccm, christian music, church, grace, masks
