Who Needs Air . . . ?

I long to taste adventure
Like the nature of the Sea
Always moving , always hiding
All the creatures underneath
Singing silent songs of sadness
My heart waits for its chance
To dance upon the ashes of
My burnt up little plans
And I

Stand alone before the night
My nakedness is so clear
In the glow of the moonlight
Life is old
But so short
We are young
We want more


Hey all . . . first verse / bridgey part of a song called Who Needs Air by The Classic Crime. It's been floating around my headspace for a bit this past season. It captures a bit of the heart cry I've got, this almost desperate need to live a life of substance and adventure and meaning and depth. I don't want to live for myself at all - life is SO MUCH BETTER SHARED! My heart DOES long for a chance to dance upon those ashes, to embrace the mystery and ambiguity of life and love and friendships and faith and God. I used to have this whole "knowledge is power" approach to life - if I knew God better, if I knew my own worth, if I knew what it was to have "arrived", if I knew I was financially and relationally secure . . . ad naseum.

But the thing is, the whole nature of life is that we don't know. I don't know what will happen this week. That doesn't mean we adopt some twisted form of fatalism and resign ourselves to a future we can never control; rather, I say rejoice that you can't. Who wants to anyway? It's too safe.

Some reading this may know my own rather deep heartaches and hurts and wounds. If this is you, then perhaps you would expect Greg to want to build those walls around his life, to never let anyone in, to never be hurt again. Follow me on this though - and I could be wrong, so think it through and post a comment. The desire to control the future, which often manifests itself as a manipulating of people , is the exact source of pain that leads to a wanting to control the future, thus avoiding that pain. A bit much?

Let's say you've been rejected by a lover. You promise yourself that that will never happen to you again. You'll never let anyone else hurt you like that as long as you live. You meet someone - they seem wonderful, you hit it off, there's a potential for real and deep relationship. You get scared - what if I get hurt. In a desire to not allow that potential future to happen, you reject your beau. Push him/her away. It doesn't mean you leave them per se, but there are sealed areas of your life they aren't allowed into, no matter how much they have proved they aren't going anywhere. Maybe you do leave them. The wound that you so intensely defend against becomes the wound that you inflict on someone else, all because you want to prevent something that may never happen.

There are other examples, but this will have to suffice for now. Burn up some of your little plans. Embrace the mystery. Let your heart be surprised. And, more than anything, break that cycle of hurt.