What I Want My Music To Do - 4/2/25

Audio

In my childhood home, my favorite room was the sunroom placed gracefully adjacent to the kitchen. The eastern wall was all window: a wide frame for prairie sunrises. There were sofas enough to seat everyone and they never sat dusty. From friendly theological debates to formal family discipline, this space facilitated a wide variety of regular family endeavours. On the northern wall there hung a comprehensive print of Antonio Ciseri’s 19th century Ecce Homo, translated from Latin: ”behold the man”. If ever our discussions lost their direction my mother would point to the painting, mirroring Pontius Piolet’s gesture, and interject with this question: “who is he?” Setting Christ as the center of our conversations was what gave them unity and purpose. Sometimes it helped us to understand one another instead of speaking past each other over a passage of scripture, other times it shed light on seeds of bitterness that had been long cloaked in bickering. The picture served as a reminder of the mundane grace which punctures all things, from sips of morning coffee to late night suppers.

Considering what and who he (Christ) really is, the question is always relevant regardless of the context. He is before all things and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). From him and through and to him are all things. (Romans 11:36) Not only is he the resolution behind the existential inquiries of Ecclesiastes, he is also the reason that petunias have five pedals, snowflakes have six arms and attercops have eight legs – you see – he likes them that way. Furthermore, because he is the center of all things, all things have a center. Every moment and molecule has both posture and purpose. In the words of Gordon Spykman: “Nothing matters but the kingdom, but because of the kingdom, everything matters.” All reality is merely a reflection of his personality. All history is his story, and therefore we, by no will of our own, have been cast as his characters.

20th century philosopher Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as: “incredulity toward metanarratives.”  In other words, he believed that there is no larger story that you are part of. Consequentially, life therefore has no intrinsic meaning. But that is simply not true. As we walk in this world we are saying something with every step, and our shoes are dripping with ink. Sometimes, the marks we leave are embarrassing but we can’t erase them on our own. The best we can do is divorce ourselves from any sense of direction or story via some very intellectual moral abdications and duct taped bananas selling for six million dollars. The result is an illusionary relativistic vacuous existence with our pathetic selves at the pointless center. In my experience, it’s just plain awful. Debate the existence of deities and metanarratives all you want, I’ve taken my stand with Puddleglum because to me, pointlessness is worse than pain. I see meaninglessness as uglier than evil. Scratch that, I see them as the same thing. The best antidote to it? Words, really good ones.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them… 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:6-9)

Words are God’s favorite weapon. His words remind us when we are forgetful, awaken us when we are slothful, clarify when we are confused, and cut us when we are conceited. Not only does Christ use words to wake us to his existence, but he is the Word. The Word of which all words speak. Therefore, words act as our window into the infinite and the eternal. By words we take those wonderful moments during which we are not all that blind and pin those moments to paper, so that we may wake ourselves when our gaze gets dull.

But powerful as words are, writing to capture reality is like trying to dam Niagara with a butterfly net. Sure, the few drops you get are delightful but it won’t quite quench your thirst. The reality is that words are mere tools, two dimensional vehicles for our experiences. They have lots of potential but there must be a deeper way to package the parcel.

My father uses a blue highlighter to remind him of the good bits he reads, but it has trouble sticking to sunsets, or thunderstorms, or the cries of the Meadow Lark in the Spring. His guitar is more helpful (N.D. Wilson, 2017)

Words are magical, but songs? Songs are glorious. Music houses the magic which words cannot quite capture. Music is for the moments for which words would be much to dull. Words are black and white and some experiences demand that the contour of our voice takes on colour. When height and depth are inadequate we must integrate breadth and width. This world is wonderfully overwhelming and when a Christian is crushed by the weight of its glory, hymns squeeze out.

I’ve been given so much in my life; some sweet, some sorrowful. However, sometimes I abandon Piolet’s posture and make myself the center. As I do, my whole existence seems tasteless and meaningless, not because I have lost myself, but because I have lost sight of my Lord. I get forgetful of his grace and mercy and therein grow numb to his beauty and deaf to his narrative. Often God slaps me out of it with good songs. Music helps to open my eyes when I am blind to the wonder in this world, and the wonder of the One who made it. When I see his creation clearly and in color, there are stirrings in my soul which will not settle until they come out in song, and so I sing. My mission is to use music in a way which points people ever onward and upward by looking and loving upward and then outward because if we look outside of ourselves and look rather to the One who is the center of all things, we will find, not only the most beautiful thing, (our Lord and savior) but the beauty in every good thing, the meaning in every painful thing, and the bittersweet in everything in between. We are not merely matter, we matter. This life matters. How we stand matters. How we walk matters. How we speak and think and breathe and blink and enjoy and love and hate and fight and live and die matters. I want everyone else to see that too. That’s what I want my music to do.

What I Want My Music To Do ~ Lyrics

What I want my music to do – 3/22/25

I fell in love with how the strings said “Sit and listen”

How the fiddle sang, “Hey, there's something here I oughta say”

There's something special ‘bout a story summed up in 3 minutes

Or how wood and steel can speak in their own way

So if you hear me singing, make sure I say something

that means something true

'cause what all is my music if I don't show love to a listener?

I want to make him known to you.

Songs have made me quite the fighter and the dreamer

Broke me down and brought me close to my Redeemer

And I want everybody else to feel that too

That's what I want my music to do

I'm gonna turn the head of one I'm gonna turn a nation

Heal someone’s heart, or maybe make them cry

By the power of the pen capture creation

And live to love this lovely gift we have called life

So if you hear me singing, make sure I say something

that means something true

'cause what all is my music if I don't show love to a listener?

I want to make him known to you.

Songs have made me quite the fighter and the dreamer

Broke me down and brought me close to my Redeemer

And I want everybody else to feel that too

That's what I want my music to do

It don’t matter, if they don’t think it matters

I’ll grab my pen and paper and write it all down

Cause a touch of heaven is all I’m really after

But I believe a part of heaven’s right here and now

So if you hear me singing, make sure I say something

that means something true

'cause what all is my music if I don't show love to a listener?

That’s all a song should do

Songs have made me quite the fighter and the dreamer

Broke me down and brought me close to my Redeemer

And I want everybody else to feel that too

That's what I want my music to do

Suggested Seeds

Chesterton, G. K. (1908). Orthodoxy. The Bodley Head.

Lewis, C. S. (1953). The Silver Chair. Geoffrey Bles.

Wilson, N. D. Notes from the Tilt-a-whirl: Wide-eyed wonder in god’s spoken world. Canon Press. (2017)