When we lose ourselves in what is going on around us, we give everything over to whoever wants to trample on us. We might as well have forgotten our own names. We become everyone around us and not a single bit of who we actually are. We forget ourselves as easily as we forget our dreams.
New Years celebration is about starting something new. I am new. I become new everyday. There is still old in me and some of the old rots in me like a corpse, but the new overcomes. My hope is that I can always be new. I want to progress. If I am the same next year as I was this year, I have failed and my faith is weak. I don't want to forget myself. The person I am is based in passion and zeal. I don't want to become one of "Them."
"Them" is a breed of people that have, over time, forgotten that everything around us is spoiling. They forgot that life is in Christ and not in whatever our culture pimps as happiness. American culture is the whore that threatens to rape us of our souls. Faith. Strength. Compassion. Sacrifice. Look at a soldier and tell him of the American way of life after he has spent three Christmases in Afghanistan dodging car bombs. We consume and worry about what doesn't matter. Life is more than what you can purchase. Life is lived in the moments of silence.
Today while trying to teach my kids what a harmony is in music, I played a song I used to teach Will harmonies several years ago. It was a bad time of year to be playing that song, but the harmonies are perfect in it. I had spent hours in the garage with Will teaching him how to sing a harmony using this song. I played it tonight and was back in that garage again. It was a sudden and unexpected flood of emotion. I held it back as always, but it made itself tonight for me.
That night when I was confident that Will had learned how to do a harmony as a bass player, we wrote a song called "Toilet Paper Rockets." The original lyrics are buried with him, but the concept was that you can travel back into time, but you can never get back who you were. Bad or good. We played this song only once and Will got scared and failed to do the harmonies. His heart was in the way he looked at me across the stage when he had failed.
Failure is about learning. When we fail, we learn how not to fail. We move on keeping who we are and are stronger. When we give up, we lose ourselves and wander into the abyss that has become humanity.
Sing.
Migrate.
Thanks for reading...Z
