Random Acts of Mind by Dones

I brought my Waterdeep CD’s with me to the Christian youth camp I worked at for a couple summers in college, and played them in the kitchen where we were working. A coworker of mine (“Sweeper,” for those in the know) hated it whenever it was my turn to pick the music and I put in Waterdeep. “It just doesn’t seem right for Christian music to be all sad and depressing,” she said.

To that I say, Christian music is (or should be) about the Christian life. And while there is much joy to be found in living for Christ, there is also a lot of pain and sorrow. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn” — namely, those who mourn over their sin and the sinful world we live in. It is out of the pain of a fallen world that we know the joy of Christ’s salvation. Without the pain, we do not experience healing. Therefore, it is necessary to acknowledge the pain and sorrow we feel towards our sin and the fallen-ness of others. The minor chords sweeten the major chords; or, as Sixpence None The Richer‘s song puts it: “Tension is to be loved when it is like a passing note to a beautiful, beautiful chord.”

A radio preacher once noted that angels do not sing praises to the Lord in Scripture (they shout), but humans do sing. The preacher posited that the reason for this is that humans experience the pain of life, and the comparative joy we share in salvation prompts us to sing.

And so, without further ado, a Christian song of pain:

18 bullet holes in the body of a priest
They say he was eating a hot dog when the ammunition was released.
They say he was always fat and lazy but he was an awfully nice guy.
That’s just one more death to show you you never know when you’re gonna die.
You might be facing the beast

Sometimes, God, I feel like I’m living in a bone grinding mill
And every time I hear the sound I can barely stand still
It’s a thing I can’t quite make out sometimes but it seems to keep getting louder-
One more body from the valley of the dry bones getting ground up into powder
Against Your holy will

Oh, God, it hurts so bad to love anybody down here
Why don’t You come and help me out?
Cause I can’t even see clear

The funny thing about the way a girl gets destroyed
About the way that deal goes down
Is that everybody pretty much sees it coming at the sister
From all the way across town
And she isn’t always blinded, she isn’t always far astray
She just might not be thinking, she might be having a bad day
But when you choose, you choose, and when you drown, you drown

Oh, God, it hurts so bad to love anybody down here
Why don’t You come and help me out?
Cause I can’t even see clear

Last night I dreamed that You swallowed me into Yourself
And I was floating on the sea inside
When I landed on the shore, I saw all these people that I thought had died
I hadn’t seen some of them for ages
They had left without a single word
And when I said something to them, not a single one of them had heard

They were all looking right through everything like it wasn’t even there
Some were full of anger, some full of fear
And then I recognized that something very sad
But very beautiful was happening right here
They were all caught outside standing alone in a very heavy rain
And when a raindrop landed on my tongue
I didn’t need You to explain
That these were Your tears

Oh, God, it hurts so bad to love anybody down here
Why don’t You come and help me out?
Cause I can’t even see clear

Oh, God, it hurts so bad to love anybody down here
But oh, that’s right, You know so well
One thorny crown, three nails, and a spear
One thorny crown, three nails, and a spear

- 18 Bullet Holes by Waterdeep

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.