Michelle Branch doesn’t work either. Heck with it. Go read C. S. Lewis, “Till We Have Faces” once every four months for a year. Then goggle at God’s amazingness.
You know, I just can’t get the Jewel thing to work. Here’s a try with Michelle Branch: Her song “Goodbye to you” has this chorus:
Goodbye to you
Goodbye to everything I thought I knew
You were the one I loved
The one thing that I tried to hold onto
OK, she’s probably singing about some pimply drug user. But this is what it says to me. I thought I was holding on to God. I was really holding on to me. God was holding on to me, too. But I don’t know a Hand when I see one. So I felt like I was falling.
Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain- Jesus, in John 12:24
Yeah, but how do you think the grain feels? – Jewel, paraphrased
Once we went to see Out of the Grey, a husband–wife team. Scott referred to his wife Christine’s musical offerings at the time they met as “psycho-poetic lonely girl music”. I was thrilled with the term. Now, I confess I have an inordinate and possibly harmful predilection for this kind of music. But I’m never one to pass up a good pejorative, especially if it’s self-referential.
Why is it about this stuff? I’ll illustrate using Jewel’s “You Were Meant for Me.” If you listened to a radio in the late 90’s, you’ve heard it hundreds of times. It might all center around the line, after a couple of verses of going through the motions of life, “I’m half alive but I feel mostly dead”.
Which is it? Is she a dead person coming alive? Or a live person in the process of dying? She’s pretty sure it’s the latter. Something is actually dying: her old life that was centered in this failed relationship. Maybe something is going to replace it. But it hardly seems possible. It feels like the part of her that is dying is taking everything with it as it goes. The dead part is more real than the pathetic, dwindling living remainder of her life.
Let’s look at what is dying, or what died. It’s easy to picture the whole slow-motion car wreck of kids trying to have an adult relationship. They weren’t ready for prime time. They invested too much too soon and couldn’t hold it together. It was doomed. The key observation is that her old life died because it couldn’t survive. It had to die. It wasn’t viable.
Where on earth am I going with this? Glad you asked. Jesus talked several times about dying to live. He said you would live if you died to yourself, and die if you lived to yourself. We all know the drill.
As a simple illustration, non-introspective types might talk about how God is on our side. A little reflection moves us instead to die to that self-centered notion, and instead hope that maybe we could be on God’s side. God calls the shots; things are on His terms. Our intentions and ambitions have to die in the presence of His raw authority over what he created: us. Christians lose sight of just what a horrifying and ghastly fact this is.
What’s so awful about it? The first inkling is that we view our own selves through fallen eyes. God’s view of us is quite different. So, for instance, what kind of person do you aspire to be? We’ll your idea is probably 180 degrees off from the kind of person God wants you to be. And God’s going to let you find that out. It probably won’t be comfortable.
What kind of Christian do you wish you were? Drop it. You can’t see God’s plans, and you aren’t wise enough to guess them. You probably don’t even have the sense to know what a Christian would really be like.
What do you have to offer God? Wrong. Those are just your fallen notions and it would be sheer chance for God to see it the way you do.
Is there something you think you can accomplish for Him? Not likely. That’s probably some delusional notion about your own worth, and quite removed from what God actually intends to do with you.
Feeling nervous yet? Because this line of thought should get you feeling like you’re painted into the corner. It’s sort of like having God over as a house guest, only to have him start hurling the crockery around. At least, that’s how it seems to us. The reality is quite different, but that’s cold comfort to us, wrapped as we are in our OWN reality.
We see our life in Christ, and in fact our entire life and self, with eyes that aren’t sanctified yet. You might call them believing eyes of sin. If our lives were Jewel’s song, we are wildly in love, and we don’t know the brick wall is 200 feet ahead, closing at 75.
The second inkling comes when you reflect that a living thing doesn’t just die. Living things keep themselves alive. The only way they die is if something kills them. They get the life pounded out of them by adverse circumstances, as Jewel so poignantly portrays. So the verse about dying to oneself is very pretty and sentimental as long as you don’t think too closely about the mechanics: if you’re lucky, if God loves you, uh, He’s going to kill you.
My body has various scars attesting to the fact that I spent some years being a boy. I vividly remember the trapped feeling of being wounded. I’m bleeding, ripped in some respect, and there is no getting out of the situation. In fact, the best route forward is the most distasteful, as it involves going to a doctor over whom I have no control whatsoever. And he is going to cause me considerably more pain than I’m already having. There is no way I will be glad about going the doctor route until I’m on the other side of the ordeal. I’ll be glad then, but that is no help at all now. At this point I hate everything, and I hate the solution the worst of all. Sure, I know it’s the solution, but I still hate it.
Every Christian is half alive and half dead. It’s an open question: are you a dead person coming alive? Or a live person in the process of dying? There’s a guy over there. He’s holding a gleaming knife. He’s looking at you with a smile that is much, much too enigmatic. If you move away from him, you are a live person dying. If you go toward him, toward the disconcerting grin, toward the knife…you are a dead person coming to life. You’ll notice the distinct lack of an enjoyable option.
You see, the part of us we think is alive, is actually doomed. The Bible refers to it as dead already. That’s the part God has to kill. That’s the hell of it. My first person perspective, my identity, is solidly rooted in the part that is going to be killed. My only hope is something that not only looks like death, but actually is death. Here on earth, I’m like Jewel. My old life is what I know. It’s what I love. But it can’t live. It has to go. It’s going to be as ugly and painful as, well, death, and I know for a plain simple fact that it has to happen. I WILL feel glad about this, but not until it’s over. That certainly isn’t how I feel now. Right now I feel broken in half and I know the next wave is coming. This is like falling out of an airplane or driving off a bridge into deep water.
At least, that’s the world Jewel’s song pulls me into. In my real life I haven’t died. I’ve only had a couple broken legs and some internal bleeding. The song makes me realize I’m in the doctor’s waiting room, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The old man dies hard, but baby, he’s gonna die anyway. I don’t know if the thought of the pain or the thought of losing me is worse.
Anybody else feel this? For a man at least, my identity is bound up in what I can do, in what I can control. What I can offer. What I can solve and build and figure out and fix. And it is all going to go. Ouch, to put it mildly. When a song like Jewel’s opens my eyes and I can see the crevasse yawning at my feet, yup, it can make me cry. Seems natural.
So why do I like this music? It’s a vivid portrayal of one of the most dramatic tensions of existence. What’s not to like?