Lots on my mind… but no time to spend writing. I spent most of yesterday (Saturday) working on my niece’s computer (pulling the motherboard and components out of the black tower and installing the guts into the smaller mid-sized case). I also started re-recording more LPs, mostly from the early-80’s “Jesus Freak” days. It continues to be a pretty intense experience exposing myself to all of these old memories.

The first time I went back to church (Palm Sunday) I went to the last “church home” that I can remember, the church that my ex-wife and I got married in. When I chatted with my current love about the experienced she asked if I had memories about my ex- from the place. I had some, but it was such a new experience that I was pretty focused on the present moment and not 15-years ago. Interestingly, as I’ve gone through the LP catalog there have been moments when the music has reminded me of those days in the house on Euclid with my ex-. But listening to the music over the past day the memories are actually stronger of the days before my ex- when I was at Biola, even before my current love (whom I knew back in the Biola days)…

I must have listened to some of this stuff night and day for years. Eventually after my ex- and I split up the only music from the era that I continued to listen to was Mark Heard. “Coincidentally” at that same time I began to switch from LPs to CDs and even Mark Heard faded (occasionally I’d pull out an old tape and he’d sometimes show up in the cool-down music of my aerobics class). In fact the only artist who hung on the whole time was Sam Phillips. The appeal of Mark Heard and Sam Phillips was that I could listen to this in any venue/non-church thing. They seemed to have an artistic integrity that I appreciated without the music being too “preachy.” Ha, “too preachy…” most of my own songwriting from those Biola days was decidedly preachy and over time I grew more uncomfortable with it. Or more properly, I felt like my life was just out-of-sync with what I had been sharing in my music. Granted, much of that had begun to diminish when my ex- and I got married. I decided to stop “performing,” thinking that it’d be better for me to find my artistic satisfaction with Kim… but that never panned out. Well, it was that and a combination of feeling like what I wanted to write about no longer fit the three-minute happy Christian song format. It didn’t help that my marriage was coming unraveled and I was getting all tangled up inside with no idea what to do or how to make things right. In the end I decided to throw it all away and start over somewhere else almost as someone else.

I can’t believe that it’s been over fifteen years since those days. As I listen to the music from those days I can see how it strengthened my resolve and faith. But facing the gaps that I was finding in my personal life and an ever increasing list of intellectual/theological questions, I simply chose to switch the station and listen to different music. The question now is whether I can open myself to the music (faith) and remain true to what I’ve learned over the intervening 16-years. Perhaps it’s disingenuous but I remember thinking that my doubts and intellectual concerns would only be a drag on those spiritual brothers and sisters and rather than reinterpret what I mean by “Christian” I simply chose to no longer use the word.

There was one party I remember going to after my divorce, when I was working on my BA in journalism at CSUF, where I ended up talking about religion with the host and her live-in boyfriend over several bottles of wine. The conversation lasted long past the tolerance of the other guests and they basically ended it saying that they had to get some sleep (wimps! Ha!). One comment I remember the host saying toward the end was that I was missing the point of Grace. She was probably right, but I couldn’t hear it. The fact that I was going back to my studio apartment drunk and alone and that she was going to go upstairs to be with her live-in boyfriend only pointed to how much I was clueless about grace.

The other day I was thinking that it wasn’t about being “right,” even though that was very much the focus of pretty much everything, especially for “Mr. B.A. in Biblical Studies.” It wasn’t about being right. It was about being loved. It was about being loved as I was. But as soon as I experience the liberation of that love, I seemed to forget it and found myself striving to be “good enough” and never really being good enough. She was right. I’d forgotten what grace meant and had lost all the joy and liberation of being loved by God. And it’s taken the love of a friend from back then (and all the horrendous complications of being in love with a married woman) for me to rediscover that it’s always been about love and not about “being right.” Now there’s something worth singing about. JBB

Music: No One Believes – Keith Green – For Him Who Has Ears to Hear