Where's My Next Song Coming From?

The past three days, a line from this show some of us watched on sunday has been haunting me. The show, Touched by An Angel, was recounting a story of a terminally ill kid, very sickly yet very brave. Along comes junior angel, discussing the kid's condition with senior angel. And senior angel said "The kid's very sick. His dreams are all broken, so that the Lord could give him wisdom."

And somehow that line has just stuck in my mind. Larry Crabb says God shatters our dreams that we might be recipients of the dreams that are well and truly God's, instead of our own. Gene Edwards says our dreams are broken and we live through pain that we might learn the kind of humility befitting a Servant King. And now senior angel says that we experienced broken dreams that we might gain wisdom.

Gene Edwards says in another book of his, The Inward Journey, where he talks abt the passage in Hebrews that says Christ was perfected in His suffering. And he goes on to say that Christ had to learn abt suffering in his time on earth, something he had to experience. And so he made a statement to the effect of how there are lessons to be learnt through the process of pain and broken dreams.

Yet I feel the crux of the issue lies in the perseverance through such pain. The one who is unwilling to go through it will emerge bitter and hollow, having picked up nothing from his trip into the valleys. It is only the willing traveller through the valley of death that will emerge all the wiser, and all the more glad. Only willingness will allow the Lord to turn mourning into dancing. Anything else is meaningless pain that we struggle to get out of, albeit in vain. Maybe that explains why so many Christians have great difficulty in trusting God to lead them through pain, and turn away. Because they weren't willing to enter into the pain at all in the first place. The demands that God seems to place on us to trust and obey, even when every fibre within our being is crying out for release, to cut loose and run away from our burdens... it seems almost too cruel to have come from a God who claims to love us.

The past 2 years of blogging has shown me that I'm only 2 yrs into what seems to be my own 40 yrs in the dessert. I keep circling around back to the same issues, dealing with my past failures and my longing to recapture my shattered dreams. Two songs that I treasure has served as sort of like the two pillars that kept my life from crashing everytime I felt the urge to just break away from God and indulge in my desires, to find some release for my heavy and tired heart. The first is a classic oldie, Trust His Heart. I remember the first time I heard it, and how the tears just wouldn't stop flowing at every word of the chorus. It was exactly the words I needed to hear back then.

"So when you don't understand, when you can't see His plan, when you can't trace His hand... Trust His Heart."

Not His promises in the Bible, because it just sounds so hollow. Not anything people can tell me about Him, because it seems that He's never failed anyone except me. Instead, trust His heart. Something intangible, yet the only thing that I can grasp at when it seems that there's no other way to make sense of what I was going through.

The other song is the one I posted up. If You Want me To, by Ginny Owens. I guess after my initial brush with failure and disappointment, and have learnt to handle it, I managed to make sense of it by telling myself it was moulding my character, and shaping my spirituality. I managed to convince myself that there was value in it, and thus not an exercise in futility. All my failures, all my demons, all my loneliness was there because God wants to use these trials in my life to shape me into the man that He wants me to be. Yet after 2 yrs, I look back and I don't think my trials have taught me much. I'm still as bitter, still as lonely, still as weak, still as insecure... and I still feel as far from God as I was for the longest time now...

That was when the song really struck something in me. I learnt not to start looking for agendas in the things I go through, to make excuses for God, that all those things I went through have been turned by God into something that worked for my good. I've learnt to acknowledge that my life is far from ideal. In fact, it is the pits. And realistically, it doesn't look like its going to get better. This world isn't geting any brighter. Its getting darker. And the scars I bear will probably never disappear magically, but will be what I carry with me till the day I die. I guess what the song has taught me is that despite all this... I will go through it - as long as it is what He wants me to. Simple as that.

And when this thought first hit me, it was pretty liberating. It made me understand how there were so many who could so graciously bear up under the most gross of injustices, and with so little in their life to cause envy. I guess it was a lot easier to bear with the pain when I no longer had to look for rhyme and reason of why I go through what I go through. So I no longer need to wonder why I go through each day with a heavy heart, or why my days seem to be characterized more by defeat and surrender rather than victory. I just need to trust His heart, then live through everything that comes my way, as long as it is what He wants me to do.

And a timely reminder it was tonight. I seem to have entered into another cycle of restlessness and melancholia. Christmas is round the corner. I remember posting a while back about how I can't wait for Christmas to be here, that I might have something to stir up hope within me. The last two weeks I felt I was running out of time. That its getting harder and harder to care for people. To reach out to those around me. To look out for them, and to keep up with them. Increasingly I found the temptation to shut myself in to be stronger and stronger. To just about anyone else, I would have seemed to be doing well. I'm getting better and better at hiding the melancholia and depression that is eating away at me inside.

Tonight as I sat down to think a little, I guess these two songs provided some form of comfort to me. It reminded me of a time when what I went through wasn't meaningless, because my meaning was found not my my self-fulfillment, but in fulfilling what He wants and desires.

And I'm left with a longing for yet another song to come my way, to serve as yet another pillar in my life, to keep it from crashing down around me. I once had such a song for 4 yrs, but that one has come and gone for good.

I'm still waiting, and I guess I'll keep on waiting... if He wants me to.