Jazz

{ July 22, 2007 @ 12:41 am } · { music }
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So I’m really getting into jazz.  I appreciate it so much.  Jazz is so awesome in the way that its completely about the person playing the music, they make it.  Jazz is different from classical in the way that its not really structured, and therefore the musicians who play it really determine if it will be good, if it will be moving and inspiring. 

I’m listening to Ray Charles duets, its an awesome CD.  I’m listening to the song “fever”  its just great.  Its one of those songs you can’t just sit there and listen to it, you really take part in it, whether you just close your eyes or tap your foot.  Jazz is an experience. 

I love how jazz almost sounds like chaos, its almost confusing, and you wonder whats happened and how it got to sounding like this…and each instrument takes its turn carrying the beat while the others make their runs and create a unique sound to each song.  Its chaos in the midst of order, I mean they have a key that they are playing in, and they can’t go out of that, but they’re free to do what they want within it.

Sometimes I wonder if this can be compared to life, we all have a general direction we’re heading or a general idea for the kind of people that we want to be the things we do and don’t want to be about, and thats our steady beat.  but as for the in-between of all of that, thats for us to create and invent new sounds, a new song.  I think as christians we are good with the beat we have the rythm down, but when it comes to the creating, we’re afraid or hesitant.  We know what we do and don’t want to be about and thats good, but past that, are we able to make up new sounds? invent new things within the structure of our lives, allow some creativity….maybe thats what its about.

I want my life to be like a jazz song, I don’t want clarity just creativity and a trust that God knows where he’s taking me and through it all alllowing what was meant to come out whether through music or writing or anything else, letting it come out… and every once in a while turning on some Ray Charles, closing my eyes, tapping my foot and experiencing some jazz.

Love

{ July 20, 2007 @ 11:36 pm } · { Life }
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Tonight I went and saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix.(stop reading here if you havn’t seen it and don’t want to know some stuff from it)  It was powerful, I mean truly inspiring.  I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that much emotion during a movie, I was deeply moved. 

I don’t want to ruin the movie, but the villian in the movie, his goal is to creep in unnoticed, for the world to deny that he is back.  There Is a group of people fighting against this, they are raising the awarness that he is here and we have to get ready to fight him.  The other goal of the vilian is to drive people into isolation, particularly Harry Potter.  To make him feel alone, like there is no one that can understand him or help him.  There is a battle in Harry’s life between what is good and what is evil, and he realizes that there is darkness in his heart.  A great quote fromn the movie is Harry’s godfather(godfathers are the greatest :) )  says to him..”we all have darkness and light in us, thats not who we are its what we decide to act on…that is who we are.” 

At the end the villain is in Harry’s mind trying to fight him from the inside out…and the villain is showing harry all these things he has in common with him..trying to get him to turn evil…He’s trying to make harry think that there is no difference between himself and Harry….and then Harry realizes the difference, and he says to the villain, “I know something you’ll never know, I know friendship and love, You will never know those and I pity you.”  This is the most powerful point in the movie (sorry for ruining it for anyone who hasn’t seen it) Harry in the most crucial moment chooses good…He is being torn between the two and in the confusion one thing pulls him out one thing brings him back to good.  and that is the love found in friendship.

Anyways there is so much application I find from this movie.  Love and friendship are the greatest things, and we should hold tightly to them becuase it is those things that will get us through.  And more then that, life is about love and friendship.  We would do anything for love, we would sacrifice everything for friendship.  We would move accross the country, we would work past the wounds of earlier years, we would kill we would be killed sacrifice ourselves.  There is no question about what is the most powerful force in the world it is Love….
It makes me wonder why as christians we’ve tried to bring people back to good, by promising them a better future, when in all truth the only thing that would bring them back would be the friendships they’ve formed the love they have felt.   “God IS love.” 
Love should be behind everything I do, because God should be behind everything I do, Love should be found in all of creation, because God is found in all of creation.  Love is in every breathe because God is in everybreathe, and Love was and is and will be because God was and is and will be.  The world moves for love, because it was love that put it in motion. 

 God identifies himself so closely as love, surely there would be nothing wrong with is if we spent the rest of our lives learning about love, and practicing it to all we met.  May the kingdom of love come, may it come today in our words and our actions in our homes and all throughout the world.

Trust

{ July 17, 2007 @ 12:36 am } · { Life }
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I know this woman who is amazing.  She has been sick most of her life with a disease that has kept her bedridden.  She had two small children and her husband died, when her first “flair up”  occured and she was left unable to take care of her kids or provide any source of income.  She is my Grammy, and i’ve never met another person i’ve been so inspired by. 
I went to camp Barnabas(a camp for kids with special needs) a couple of weeks ago and met some pretty amazing kids.  They are incapable of taking care of themselves they rely on other people to do the most simple things for them.  Something about them is captivating and for a long time I couldn’t figure it out (its not just one thing but I’ve decided this is a major one)  There is a connection a similarity between them and my Grammy. The same thing that is so beautiful in those children, I see also in her.  What is it?  Well I have often asked myself the same question, and drawn the conclusion that it is TRUST.  They understand this concept of trust that is so foundational for our relationship with God.

When you can’t get out of bed, you rely on people to help provide, to help you, to take care of your kids, to clean the house.  There is no independence, just complete reliance. 

When you are a child who has CP and cannot control your muscles you rely on other people to help you move and eat and get dressed. 
We live in a culture that values the importance of independence….self reliance…a culture that has for the most part advertised the so called “successful” as those that can think, move, talk, breathe, eat etc… on their own.  And we wonder why so many relationships fail so many marriages end in divorce.  What is it that is missing?  Is it trust? 
Have we, the “healthy”  gotten so caught up in our ability to provide for ourselves that we’ve forgotten how to trust because we’ve never really had to?  I have bought into this way of thinking, that when I have to ask for help there is something wrong with me.  Can independence become a stumbling block for relationships?  Our trust goes hand in hand with our vulnerablity, our honesty.  I cannot allow anyone to truly know me if I do not trust them.  I have often wondered why it is hard for me to trust.  What if it has to do with the fact that it has been ingrained in my mind that independence is the sign of health, and I think to a degree that is true, but trust is a sign of health too. 
I have always seen so much trust in people who have gone through difficult things.  Mother’s who have seen their children battle cancer, children who have grown up without parents, families who have lost everything.  I have seen these people have so much trust in God, in his love and I desire to be like that.  I find trusting God to be a difficult thing.  I think that the best way for me to learn how to trust God is to learn how to trust people, those that are in my life that Love me.  To open up and say “I have problems…I need help”  and to trust that my friend will encourage and see me for who I am.  To begin to understand trust on a small scale.
We are all the same in the way that we have dissabilities, we have weaknesses whether they are visible to the eye matters not. 
I experienced true community and friendship at Camp Barnabas because the authenticity causes you to realize that everyone has problems and the energy that you once spent trying to fix your problems is now directed towards helping other people, and the problems you found in your heart for once really start healing.  Was church meant to be like this?

I am inspired by trust, trust that causes us to say, “I can go on because I am not alone.” 

TRUST

Music

{ July 13, 2007 @ 7:58 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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I love music, and i’ve been thinking about it a lot because my friend Bobby and I have been working on some songs for a thing we have tonight.  As I sit here now he’s playing piano in the background, I feel like I have a soundtrack.  Do you ever think about how much more exciting or moving things would be if there was a soundtrack to our lives?  In the movies like Lord of the Rings the music makes it so much more heroic, so much more inspiring.  What is it about music that is so moving.  I think that we can really feel music, we hear it, and we sense the emotion.  We are vulnerable when we play music becuase what we are feeling at that moment comes out in the form of loud and soft notes pieced together to form lines of music stacked on top of eachother forming harmonies melodies, and finally a song.  We connect with music becuase it is beautiful, when we hear a moving song like Fix You by Coldplay it is powerful, our hearts synchronize to the beat of the song, and we memorize the words because on a deep level we can relate to it.  Past the lyrics the slow rise of sound maybe we are moved by music because it shows us how when things are placed perfectly together perfectly in tune it is beautiful.  Maybe there is a part of us that desires to be perfectly in tune with something and through time we have come out of tune, we’re missing something theres something bigger going on but we’ve lost our place in it. 

Music is not just notes, it is an experience, perhaps music is something that ties us to what was originally supposed to be.  I like to think that it hasn’t changed that music is one thing that was not broken, and so we are moved when we hear it because it is still in its original form. Or maybe its just simply beautiful. 

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