Choice

Lord,

Don’t make me choose between good music and music for You.

Why must the only avenue I’m brave enough to be take be the road of pleasant acoustic strumming within the wet, reverberating space of an old stone church?

Must everything I do for You be so bland?

I struggle over sine wave synths and digital distortions that push the ears into ecstasy and the body into joyful movement, but I don’t know how to make these fit with the gentleness of my words and the piety of congregational clapping.

Is it that I’m not ‘good enough’ for the ‘real world’ of music and I must settle for the bouncing masses of Christian teens that are excited for new releases into the scene that is C-C-M? Will I even get that far, or will I be rejected even by the crowd labeled ‘easily pleased’?

Why have You allowed my mind to be stretched beyond that vision? Why did You expose me to the bewildering conceptual madness of Cage, or the guttural, primal vocalisations of Bellamy? Why must I sing sweetly when a beast sleeps? Why must my body sway when my bones ache to make it roll and pop? I am at war within myself. I want to honour You, but there is so much I know that I cannot connect with the example of others who sang in Your name.

Or is it that no one has dared offer these things on Your altar?

Are there others like me? – dying to be freed into oceans of sound to hone shipwrecks into glittering vessels, while families and churches call them back to shore in worried tones?

I want to dive into sound, but I fear in doing so I would leave You standing in the silent sand where our footprints used to match.

I’m sorry, Lord, I cannot choose. I feel I am growing into something that makes no sense in Your plan. Have I got it wrong? Will You cut me down and start again?

Please, show me something new.