To be perfectly honest, sometimes I just hate Christian music. I don’t hate all of it, there are some great people out there, and I grew up with it, but the last ten years or so it has gone far too often to an entirely new place. I call it dishonesty. That sounds harsh, so let me try to explain. I totally agree that the life of a Christian can be really difficult- it’s a much harder life to walk out then you realize when you sign up! I also totally agree that as Christians, we have the beauty of faith, and the amazingness of love and joy and promise in the Lord. But oddly enough, these two very conflicting topics are getting too mixed up in the Christian life, and it’s bleeding into the music and getting on my nerves (and I am obviously not the only one who sees it that way, check out the video below).
For instance, I am a physician. I am a pediatrician and I have to be real and vulnerable in order to talk with patients. I cannot walk into the room of a little girl with a deadly disease and say, “this is a hard season, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Because to be perfectly honest, I don’t know that- I know it is possible it won’t be fine but I hope for something more. But in that moment, I don’t offer them awful news and empty hope, I don’t offer them harsh honesty mixed with a joyful tone about unlikely possibility. There’s a time a place for everything (Ecclesiastes 3:1-14). So I cautiously and empathetically tell them the truth. And I let that moment be about sorrow and confusion and brokenness and reality. And I leave it there. Because you can’t move on to anything else real if you haven’t been through honesty and vulnerability first. It’s not worth anything real if you don’t hit the bottom and break so God can heal it. Not in medicine, not in life, not in relationships, and not in music.
So as not to use a real song and offend any real musicians who I’m sure are all awesome people and doing their best, I’m going to contrast typical Christian music songs with Linkin Park. Because I was a Christian when I first started listening to them and because of the bondage I was in to perfectionism and problematic way I was pretending bad stuff didn’t exist and I was fine, their music brought me to a place where I admitted it, and let that moment of pain be real. Some of the lyrics to the song In the End were “One thing, I don’t know why, it doesn’t even matter how hard you try… I kept everything inside and even though I tried, it all fell apart.” Though I knew it wasn’t true, my life reflected the lyrics in the song more than it reflected your typical Christian lyrics like “It’s a desert sometimes but it’s okay.” And that song got me to a place where I finally admitted that yeah, I was struggling, and life wasn’t all gumdrops and lollipops. And this was the lesson I needed to learn- God eventually showed me that He fixes things, not me. And when I finally admitted to God that life sucked sometimes and I couldn’t fix it, that was when he finally started to heal me. But to be honest with you, I only got there by listening to non-Christian music, because they were genuine about life in a way I couldn’t find anywhere else.
I love bands like Linkin Park who will pour their soul out on a page in song because they’re real! They’re not pretending or trying to hide sadness or trying to say something positive because it sounds good. They’re not faking anything- they’ve completely risked everything- risked being hurt and rejected and having their message misinterpreted but still poured their soul out- open and bare for everyone to see. Because what good does it do to keep it in? And how can anything ever change if you pretend it’s not there? And how can we say we’re in a relationship with God if we’re not honest with Him about how we actually feel?
I realize I’m not as transparent as I’d like to be, even in writing music. It’s so easy to change what you actually were trying to say into a “more widely accepted Christianese phrase” instead of the truth. But we don’t get to real life by trying to hide from it or rushing forward through the hard times to get back to happy. As scary as honesty can be- I try to remember what it’s like to be freed- to be vulnerable, and pour your soul out, and then be accepted by God in spite of the badness. And I wish we all lived life in that kind of freedom.
So how about you? Are you really honest with God when times get rough, or are you brushing over the things that He maybe wants you to dig into and be finally healed from?
Ecclesiastes 3:4- “There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain… a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.”