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BKSTaxMan
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Name: Brandon
Location: Waco, Texas, United States
Gender: Male
Interests: Music (listening to it, playing it, pretending to play it, listening to it in my head while pretending to listen to other people talk to me, etc.)...meeting interesting people, watching homestar runner, playing illegal copies of old SNES games on my computer, i mean...no, i mean...wght jght, yes i'm awesome!
Occupation: Student
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  BKSTaxMan
Member Since:
8/20/2004
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| this is me right now...i pray it speaks to you too.
"Hear our cries, Lord, hear our prayers.
Take our burdens, calm our
fears.
God, will you make us a people that love You?
Please take our
offerings that we set before You.
God, hear our prayers that we’re
lifting up to You.
God, see our tears that we’re struggling to see
through.
God hear our prayers to You
In our weakness You remain.
When
we’re broken You sustain.
God, hear our prayers, we lift them to You.
God, hear our prayers, Lord, make our hearts true.
God, hear our
prayers as we lift them to heaven.
We’re praying the angels receive and
embrace them.
The hopes of the empty, the cries of the broken.
We’re
reaching our hands out.
Oh Lord, will You hold them?" | | |
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We are quite small, yet we have a God who takes interest in our lives...
...so don't fret, child. Trust in Him and not yourself.
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| Seriously, my mind needs a defrag tool.
What to write, what to write... I feel that today was very...what's the right word...i suppose "blah" describes it fairly well. I would love to just lay out in plain English all the things that are going through my head, but it would be too long for anybody to be expected to sit through (although some of you have gracefully done so already). And something about how artists are supposed to make the complicated simple comes to mind as well.
But really, i am pretty much at the point where i am comfortable in my own shoes, and then this situation comes up, and i feel like i'm 7 years old and have no idea what i'm doing again. (Do you girls know that you do this to us?) Anyways, now that that's out there, i'm at a loss. That's the key isn't it...being comfortable. I've found that God doesn't particularly care for it when we're comfortable. I'm not o.k. with uncomfortable, but really who is? I know the right thing to do, but that doesn't make it any easier to do. Eventually something has to give, and I will have to step, knowing things could go either way. It all sounds so simple. Really it is fairly simple...
Which brings us back to...meh.
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| ...or an Armenianist for that matter...
Just a disclaimer/interesting side note before I start this one...it's weird but my last Xanga post and last Facebook note (though they were both written, like, a year ago) were both about cool experiences I had at concerts. So is this one. I suppose that could tell you something about me and music...we're "tight like woah" as my sister might say.
So i got to go to the David Crowder*Band CD release party, and it was an experience to say the least. They are really talented at what they do along with the fact that Crowder played a modified Guitar Hero II controller that actually sounded guitar chords along with the band on "...Neverending..." It was priceless.
And it was hot...super hot in fact. A couple hundred people packed into a fairly small space, singing their lungs out tends to do that. They said that there was an air conditioner in the building and that it was operational, but I think they should've checked their sources on that one. They had bottled water, though…for a dollar each. Anyways, halfway through the set, when everybody was sweating far too much for their own good, Crowder called out for some water to be thrown to the crowd for free because, as he noted, none of us were actually going to go out of the show and buy water at this point, right? So they threw it out to us, and people went crazy since there were hundreds of people and maybe 6 bottles. These people knew their need for water very clearly, and somebody was coming to meet their need. (Here's where the philosophical comes in…it all has a point, I promise).
Some people took it all, drank it down and thought nothing of it, but then there were some who drank a bit and started to hand it back so others could get some. Now i realize that this is a little odd and gross to some of you and you don’t know these people and you’re not sure what in the world they could’ve secretly spiked this water with, but honestly, if you're that hot, formalities start to go out the window pretty quick. As expected, the people around me and one girl in particular didn’t want anything to do with this tainted water. She wanted relief, she said, but not if it came from something somebody else had handled…
…I see truth here…
Think about it this way. What if the guy in front would’ve set aside his “rights” to water, getting it first and all, and passed it straight back to someone else in need? Would she have taken it? Would you? I think odds are anybody would have. Isn’t this exactly what we do with God? People sometimes have this caustic, biting kind of reaction if you try and just tell them about God, about what you have found in Him, the life and truth and beauty there…all good things, but it’s like you’re handing them half a bottle of water. Most of us have been “trained” or “socially adjusted” or whatever to not trust the things that other people have had their hands on because so many of them corrupt these beautiful things so badly.
What if instead we laid down what we could keep for ourselves and gave them all of it, the whole bottle? What if we didn’t keep any, but tried to live out the love we find it so hard to talk about sometimes? Would it be easier than talking about it or harder?
…yes…
I’ve heard that we are called to hold our hands against the wounds of a broken world, to stop the bleeding. I’ve also been told that the Church is most beautiful when she is giving herself away. And I believe it. We are at our best when we go throughout our lives with other human beings and do our best to love…without agendas and whether or not they end up believing the Truth that we hold on to…because with an agenda it’s not love. We love just to love. Because we know it’s right. Because it’s what He would do…because it’s what He does.
You’ve probably heard all this before, and I have too but just to be reminded helps sometimes. A guy named James wrote alot about this...he called it "faith and works." He's kind of a big deal. And thank you, girl in the middle of the Crowder concert. I hope you don’t think that I was insulting you in any way, shape or form. You helped me to see truth. And that is very important. And I thank you for it.
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| ...then again, maybe not.
I feel something...i just need to write, i think. Most days these thoughts, my thoughts, stay pretty well contained, but now and again they need to come out. Sometimes it takes days like these to get me to flood my feelings through this keyboard in the contemplative hope that somehow it will help make things better...that in some way God will use it to reach somebody who needs to hear that someone else is going through the same things as you and that He will use it to reach me in the process. Ok, ready? Here goes:
I'm beginning to hate (yes, hate) the fact that there are two natures still inside of me. Twenty-four-seven war is not fun at all when you can be a casualty anytime you let your guard down.
I really want to stop putting my hope into anything that's not God. Hope is an amazing thing, and i don't want to waste it anymore.
I realize that no matter what, i don't think we can ever have pure, holy intentions for anything we do. Period. That hurts.
/rant
But seriously now...
Above all...i just wish i was with God. I mean, sitting here with Jesus Christ...listening to Him tell me everything i need to know...just talking with Him and letting Him talk to me. I would love nothing more than to be able to hear Him talk to me...you know what i mean. I remember being at a Mae concert once and they were singing "Giving It Away," i think, and i just looked up above everyone else and thought to God, "I wish You were here. You're not here. Not physically with us. This isn't how it's meant to be...this is not right." I physically ached to have my Savior standing next to me. I hold onto that memory because i think that at least in that moment, i understood something that's universal to us all.
At that moment i was painfully aware...as i am now...that this world is more incomplete than we can ever realize. We have things to make life very good while we're here, and i intend to enjoy a great many of them...music, art, creation, friendship, love, but as Mute Math is urging through my headphones, "We are still far from over." This is not all that there is to us...thank God there are experiences this world can't contain and only He can bring...
I can't believe i do this. I don't even intend to come out of this writing with hope, and then somehow through all of the stuff...that's where it all leads. Incessant Hope...unwavering comrade...you don't ever seem to go away from me...not for long at least.
i do not know what will happen tomorrow,
i do not know what will happen today,
i do know that i will fail, quite a few more times
i do know that You will say
I knew about this from the beginning, My love does not go away.
I'm going to try something a friend suggested awhile back. I'll finish this all by writing out what i'm trying to say by using only (or in this case, mostly) song titles for words. You can try it too. See if you can catch all of them and comment on the number of songs and what they are (with artists). Here goes...again:
By all accounts, today was a disaster,
Savior I'm sorry; I wasn't prepared. (My) only hope (is) all that's left...(to) turn everything over in this world until the day i die (and) hold fast hope. Will You tell me something good? God of Creation, can You hear me? I am in love with You. In this diary there is a picture of Jesus and a praise chorus from the inside (of me).
You can go away, cute boring love. I'm ready (for a) new deep. Yahweh, You say (i am) the image of the invisible...fully alive.
Here i am Mighty Good Leader...hold nothing back.
Post script: You have my attention.
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