Why should music matter to professionals?

I am sure many feel my blog is very strange. I’m not totally sure I always get it myself to be perfectly honest with you, but let me try to explain why I do it. I look at music, and movies, and the marketplace and I try to see more than what is being obviously stated. I try to see in between the lines. I started doing this in college- by just looking at the lyrics of secular songs I liked and figuring out why I liked them- what about the song actually did apply to my life. And the more I did it, the more I started seeing where they intersected with God everywhere instead of just the original lyrics.

I saw a documentary in college about how powerful music can be in our lives, and how careful we have to be with what we listen to. And it’s very true- art really does shape the way we think and the way we view the world. But if it’s got that much power, instead of avoiding it entirely, is it possible to examine it for what it is and discover both the truth and lies that it holds? As I started to do that, I started to realize that far too often as Christians, we retreat. We run away from the very culture that we were called and given the authority and ability to change. So I made a decision to not ignore, and not run away from, and not pretend that the problems did not exist. I made a decision to look at them head on and do my best to understand them.

Because though I’m limited, God is able to change the things that are into something much greater than you can even dream. And the more I believed that, the more I started seeing promise and potential and possibilities everywhere- in movies, in the marketplace, in medicine, and now everywhere I go. So instead of just complaining about the imperfections and pain in the world, I am starting to dream of possibilities of how God would address and fix it.

Far too often, we sit around trying to avoid places of desperation. But those are the very places where God meets us and redeems it and restores what was lost into something greater than what we thought it could be. That’s where he started with us, so why couldn’t we let him do the same in the world around us? I try to live my life at the edge of what I know to be true and what can’t be possible. Somewhere between what I actually see and what I know God promised. In between the lines of broken reality and incredible possibility. In between the lines of what I force myself to admit and what I dare to believe. In between the lines of what you want and what you hoped for.

 So what about you? Will you dare to dream with me too?

Romans 8:20-21- “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.”