Songwriting

I guess I have low self-esteem. I have kind of discounted my musical and songwriting abilities as mediocre at best, so I haven't really persued it with any kind of passion. Lately, I've been doing some more writing (part of the reason my blog has been silent) and getting some ideas that I think are decent.

So I went to a songwriter's association meeting the other night and found out about a workshop. A couple of songwriter's from Nashville were going to do a seminar and critique songs. I figured I would go and see how my song does with some pros. So, I make the hour drive over there and pull up to the church where the seminar is held. I didn't know if I was pulling up to a church or a convention hall! This place was monsterous! I felt like I was entering the belly of the beast or something!

So, these Nashville guys are really cool, down to earth folks. They mainly write country and Christian stuff. One is a very good musician and okay lyricist and the other is the exact opposite. So they make a great team.

People started playing songs for them and quite honestly a lot of them were subpar, hobby kind of songs. Nothing wrong with that, but not even close to being on a profession level.

So I played my song that just wrote a week ago. I was a little nervous, but got through it alright. I was stunned with the response, both from the other songwriters and the Nashville guys. The guys from Nashville really thought I had a great start to a song and suggested a few edits that I could bring back the next day. Quite a few of the other songwriters wanted me to sing demos for them and cowrite with them. I was taken aback with all of the feedback.

The next day I came back with my song reworked and the Nashville guys said they really liked it and thought it was definately commercially marketable. They said I needed to think about going to Nashville to hook up with some other songwriters and sing demos....

I don't what God is doing here...But I am along for the ride...

Creativity

I believe that God is the ultimate in creativity. I also believe that creativity is one of the ways we express His image.

A funny thing happened to me on the way out of organized religion.

I got my creativity back.

I'm not saying it is organized religion's fault, but the fact is that I have been writing more and higher quality songs than I have in a long, long time. I can think of a couple of reasons off the top of my head why this might be happening. First, a large portion of my week is no longer taken up trying to make people do what they didn't want to do in the first place, or so frustrated and hurt with the organization that I couldn't think about much else. Now I have time to think, reflect, observe and write. Second, the filter through which I see the world is different. God is much larger. My world is much larger. Neither He, or I, are confined to four walls and a certain subgroup of people that meet within those walls.

So, last night I went to a songwriter's association meeting in a nearby town to meet some new folks and have a song critiqued. It was nice to be around some creative people. The song I presented was received well and I got some nice compliments. Much like our spiritual journey, I would love to find some people to collaborate with....but it will be in God's time....

Lines Scribbled on an Envelope While Riding The 104 Broaday Bus:

By Madeline L'Engle

There is too much pain
I cannot understand
I cannot pray

I cannot pray for all the little ones with bellies bloated by starvation in India;
for all the angry Africans striving to be separate in a world struggling for wholeness;
for all the young Chinese men and women taught that hatred and killing are good and compassion evil;
or even all the frightened people in my own city looking for truth in pot or acid.

Here I am
and the ugly man with beery breath beside me reminds me that
it is not my prayers that waken Your concern, my Lord;
my prayers, my intercessions are not to ask for Your love
for all Your lost and lonely ones,
your sick and sinning souls,
but mine,
my love,
my acceptance of your love.
Your love for the woman sticking her umbrella and her expensive parcels into my ribs and snarling, "Why don't you watch where you're going?"
Your love for the long-haired, gum-chewing boy who shoves the
the old lady aside to grab a seat,
Your love for me too, too tired to look with love,
too tired to look at Love, at You, in every person on the bus.
Expand my love, Lord, so I can help to bear the pain,
help your love move my love into the tired prostitute with false eyelashes and bunioned feet,
the corrupt policeman with his hand open for a graft,
the addict, the derelict, the woman in the mink coat and
discontented mouth,
the high school girl with heavy books and frightened eyes.

Help me through these scandalous particulars
to understand
Your love

Help me to pray.

Listening To The Story

I apologize for my lack of effort here. Just not motivated to write and busyness, sickness and family issues have taken a toll on my effort and time available.

I still plan on writing some more on The Expanding Jesus, but not right now... for now let me leave you with some interesting comments from an interview with Madeline L'Engle. I have never read any of her books, but they are on my wish list now! She is a prolific author of children's fiction, poetry and theology.

• God comes to us as a human baby--a complete rejection of power. Even while Jesus is healing people, he is continually throwing the worldly power he is being offered away. They want to make him king. He runs.

• One Sunday about six years ago, I was visiting an Episcopal church in New York so low it's sort of underneath the ocean. A man stood up. "I hope this is appropriate to ask. I was an abused child. I'm terrified of being an abusive father. I need help and prayer." I knew then it was a church I could stay in. Because people are willing to be vulnerable, this church is very different. Sometimes it gets messy, but that's okay. People are not afraid to ask questions. We're able to admit we're all broken, we've all made terrible mistakes, we're all in need, and we all want things we don't have.

• It's a church in which a mother whose twenty-seven-year-old son has died is free to say, "People think I'm terrible because I can't pray." And I can reassure her, "You don't have to pray. We're praying for you. That's what the body of Christ is about." Many churches don't have that kind of freedom. I have a friend who comments, "At AA groups, I can admit my faults. At church nobody wants to hear them." What an indictment of the church!

• Instead of thanking Jesus for dying for me, I want to rejoice that Jesus was born for us, to thank Jesus for showing us how to live. The incarnation is incomprehensible love. It will never be explained.

• As a younger adult, I lived in the realm of proof. I'd had a good education, and I wanted everything explained. Now that I'm older, it's much easier to believe in--and accept--the impossible. I am able to accept more completely the idea that God loves me, no matter what I do. I have stopped wanting certainty, which will never come. Instead, I look for those things God gives us as affirmations.

• If something goes wrong, I still yell at God. But at some point I move out of this childish prayer and acknowledge, "OK, it's your universe."

• Nothing we do changes God--it just changes what we think about God. When we discovered that the earth is not the center of the universe, it didn't change God. It just changed us, and what we think. We have to be willing to allow what we think to change.