Gotcha

It’s been a while. Here’s a list of albums I love right now. I can honestly say I’m close to knowing what my favorite 10 of the year will be. Some of these won’t be there but these are all great. Listen to them at your local Spotify store. 

The Lonely Forest- Arrows (Be Everything, Tunnels, Two Notes and a Beat)

Mat Kearney- Young Love (Ships in the Night, Count on Me, Sooner or Later)

Beirut- The Rip Tide (The Rip Tide, Goshen, Santa Fe, A Candle’s Fire)

Nicki Minaj- Pink Friday (Your Love, Fly, Roman’s Revenge, I’m the Best)

Mother Mother- Eureka (The Stand, Baby Don’t Dance, Simply Simple)

And here are some songs that I love. 

The Innocence Mission- Rain

Kina Grannis- World in Front of Me

James Blake- The Wilhelm Scream

The Head and the Heart- Down in the Valley

Other Lives- For 12, Tamer Animals

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart- Heart in Your Heartbreak

French Kicks- Trial of the Century

The Middle East- Blood

Pat LePoivedin- Fire

Everyday that I’m alive I try to feed my desire for pleasure. It’s an unending desire that I can’t control most of the time. It’s vicious. My brain tells me that I need to feel, that I need to experience. Whatever the feeling, whatever the experience, it’s the pleasure of feeling alive, of feeling free, like I’m in authority of what makes me the happiest. Every bit of it is based on me. I was created to serve me. If I don’t feel anything, it’s pointless, no good, not worth my time. What frustrates me is that it’s constantly one thing to the next. I need more roller coaster experiences. The kind where I’m so afraid, so anxious, so excited, and so accomplished when it’s all said and done. If those things aren’t apart of what I’m doing, it’s on to the next one. I have to find my next high, what stimulates me. I’m speaking 100% truth about myself. I’m not tying this into some “but Jesus satisfies me” thing next. I am honestly saying, that things that I want to feel most of the time have nothing to do with God, and its just another section of lessons that I’m apprehensively learning in my life right now.

The only things that I can write about are the things that I feel like have truly opened my eyes. Thats what this is about. Something I’ve overlooked and completely disregarded has enlightened me to an incredible new view of God. Its simply Ephesians 1 and it blows my mind. There are so many things in this chapter that I’ve heard and read my whole life and they’ve never meant a thing to me until now. So many phrases that I’ve heard that I believe are now cliche have suddenly come to life. Ephesians 1 describes how “God blesses (happiness and good fortune, highly favored) us, how long before He made the earth, He loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault, how he has adopted us into His own family and has promised us a wonderful future”. It also says that He “pours out and showers His kindness on us” (I’m paraphrasing). I’ve never really thought about that. When you shower, you’re drenched. When something gets poured on you, you’re drenched, you’re fully covered in it. To think we’re constantly drenched in mercy and kindness can be cliche, but it can also be life changing. The thing that blows me away about all of this is what Ephesians says twice in chapter 1. All the things that I’ve just described, all the potential jargon that Christians use to describe God’s love for us, all these phrases and descriptions that I’ve become deaf to…God gets “pleasure” from. Thats all. Thats what blows my mind. To think that God takes “pleasure” in me is almost maddening. This is what God feels. The same feeling that I long for everyday, God desires as well, and the way He fulfills His desires is by “showering and pouring his kindness and mercy on me”. My response to that is “wow, God, you seem easily amused. There are a million other things that You might want to try Your hand at. Have you ever known what it feels like to buy things, to have money, to desire and accomplish fame? Those are just a few of the things that You should try. Not me. I promise you’ll feel more fulfilled the moment you understand what those things feels like”. But no, He chooses me, and He chooses me every time, and it brings Him “pleasure”. Mind boggling, right? For me it is. 

The main reason I can’t get over this is because of what I said in the first paragraph. I choose things. 9 times out of 10 I don’t choose God. I tell God that He’s not enough “pleasure” for me all the time. I can blurt out all the b.s. and all the write words with the best of them, but in the end, He doesn’t fulfill me. At least that’s what I say to Him in my choice of temporal things over Him. So why God is up there spending His free time on blessing me, and loving me, and pouring and showering kindness and mercy on me, and calling me His son, and in the midst of all that, telling me that it brings Him “pleasure”, I’ll just be down here in my finiteness spending time on what I can buy next that will feel the best, and how can I find a way for people to praise me on how good I am at writing songs, and how I can give my family the easiest and most “pleasurable” life ever, and in the midst of all that, I’ll be telling God that He’s just not enough yet. 

Perspective.