Bebo Norman

I’m on I-40W right now heading from Nashville toward Memphis…in the middle of a two-week run of acoustic shows with Meredith Andrews. Gabe’s driving and it’s an absolutely beautiful day outside. Still cold, which I am WAY over this far into the winter season, but blue sky and beautiful nonetheless. This little batch of shows has really been a breath of fresh air on a few different levels. For one, playing acoustic shows – just me and Gabe – is the epitome of what I love about playing live. I tell people all the time that my hope is that these acoustic shows feel more like conversations than concerts…and that has seemed to be the case so far. We’re also intentionally playing much smaller venues for the same reason – mostly crowds of 400-600 or so. The intimacy that can happen in a smaller venue acoustic show is like no other, and in a lot of ways, is what I fell in love with about live music way back in college watching people like David Wilcox, John Gorka, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Shawn Colvin. That’s what really defined the direction that my own live shows went in years later, and I feel like I’m getting back to that now…back to the heart of the things I love about playing music. After all, my first love is writing songs, and I do that in very small rooms on an acoustic guitar. That’s how the songs are born, and in so many ways that’s how I feel they are best delivered. We’ve also been driving to all of these shows, another breath of fresh air, because we’re sort of forced to see the landscape and inevitably we end up deep in conversation rather than sleeping through the night drives on a bus or settling into our seats and into our headphones on a flight to somewhere. We tend to drive a good bit on acoustic fly-dates anyway – it’s sort of our M.O. to fly into a certain region of the country – me, Gabe, and a tour manager – rent a minivan at the airport that’ll hold all of our gear (mostly just all of Gabe’s dang instruments…good grief he plays a bunch of crap), and drive to a long weekend’s worth of shows routed fairly close together. This run of shows was originally intended to be two separate runs, one based around flying into Chicago, and the next weekend flying into Atlanta. But a few extra shows landed in the middle and it just made sense to drive in and out of Nashville. So here we are, driving on a beautiful day, having just wrapped up a good long talk about real life stuff, and now listening to Brooke Fraser. Meredith’s asleep now, in the seat next to me…she flew into Nashville this morning and we picked her up on the way out of town. She’s been another breath of fresh air. It’s always nice to have a female presence around anyway because I think they just soften things a bit relative to a bunch of guys travelling around together. But Meredith’s just a good soul in particular and her heart is genuine and good. And her voice is beautiful and her songs are true. And she likes Bojangle’s chicken and biscuits. She’s from the Carolinas and so is Bojangle’s… so we celebrated that together this morning. So now I have a very full belly, but still room enough to take in yet another breath of fresh air.

As I drove alone on Wednesday morning toward the Starbucks in downtown Franklin I noticed in my rearview mirror a couple in a minivan behind me. I obviously couldn’t hear a word that was spoken, but it was plain to see that they were deep in the throes of their own private war. There were bursts of conversation – she was doing most of the talking, a lot of it with her hands – followed by long silences and empty stares out of opposite windows. It’s amazing how far apart two people can seem in such a small and confined space. Back when I was still single, it seemed like everyone I knew who was married would proudly declare, “marriage is the BEST thing you’ll ever do in your life…[long pause]…and also the hardest thing.”  The same was often said about having kids or certain career pursuits or any number of “life adventures” but the “also the hardest thing” always seemed to be saved for last, almost like an afterthought…or maybe a secret. Both parts of that statement have proven themselves true over the seven years that Roshare and I have been married, but some days it seems that the “afterthought” is the only thought. Roshare and I had a hard day on Tuesday. We had one of those arguments that in the craziness of the day followed us from the living room into the car – we too felt that same profound distance in a similarly small and confined space. I wonder now if maybe someone caught a glimpse of our battle in their rearview mirror. We were having the same kind of argument – lots of silence, never all that heated, but loaded with innuendo from things gone unnoticed, or at least unspoken, for too long. One of our mantras in marriage has always been to keep everything “on the table,” painful as it may be, so that the hidden doesn’t have his chance to silently build and fester into secret and suddenly exposed resentment. Needless to say, there are always those certain things that slip through the cracks, and, long story short, there was just more to be said that day than our busy-ness would allow.  She dropped me in Nashville to pick up a car and we set off on our diverging paths of parenthood and errands and work. By the time I saw her again that night she was fast asleep, exhausted from a long day and a late night class. I know it’s often declared that you shouldn’t go to sleep with things unresolved, and though Roshare and I subscribe to that notion for the most part we’ve also found that exhaustion can all too often cloud even the healthiest attempts at resolution. That said, we slept on it. And we both woke up Wednesday morning with clearer vision, a fresh bit of discernment, and genuinely contrite hearts. So as I walked out the door to leave for the next five days, fresh on the heels of sweet and sincere apology, we both understood quite clearly that though there was still much more to unpack emotionally and relationally we were indeed on the same team again. It’s odd to me, though at this point I suppose it shouldn’t be, that timing has everything to do with everything in relationship. It’s not just how something is said but when it’s said. And as timing always seems to go with a travelling occupation, there is often so much left to be sorted out the very moment that the bus or the car or the airplane is leaving town again. And so I drove, alone, toward the Starbucks in downtown Franklin, the minivan behind me fully engaged in their own version of “the hardest thing,” and it occurred to me that uncovering the depth of knowing someone, truly knowing them, is a never ending thing. How beautiful. Seven years in with my beautiful wife, and still uncovering.  ONLY seven years in, and despite the awkward and desperately painful turns that are inherent in the very nature of what it means to be exposed and uncovered, I pray, Lord Jesus, for seventy more. Thank you Jesus that I know my wife more deeply today than I did on Tuesday – that I love my wife more deeply. What a gift we have been given.

Man, I sorta checked out here for the last week or so.  Lots of really good time with family and friends, so I guess that’s a pretty reasonable excuse, but I pretty much bailed on keeping up with the blog so I’m really sorry for that.  Roshare started taking a class from 5PM-10PM Monday thru Thursday, so my normal blog-writing time became a bit more occupied with diapers, dinner, baths, and bedtime.  My parents came in town this last Thursday night and stayed through the weekend – Miller was baptized (dedicated really) on Sunday and we had a big “baptism party” (any excuse, right?) at our house after church with a WHOLE bunch of kids and even more Mexican food (pretty much a staple around here).  Really, REALLY, fun, but it goes without saying that our house has been a bit mad for quite a while.  Today is really the first day in a week or so that things feel somewhat normal again.  I had a writing session this morning with my buddy Stephan Sharp (he wrote Chris Tomlin’s “Made to Worship” among many others) and now I’m back home to keep the boys while Roshare runs out to Target and the grocery store, just in time for her to get back and showered before she heads to her class tonight.  Add onto that yet ANOTHER snow day here in Franklin (snowiest winter in my 10 years living in Tennessee) and you’ve got a good picture of what our world has looked like for the last little bit.  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that our dog Otis has taken up the absolutely delightful habit of “cleaning” Smith’s baby toilet for us regardless of what might be in it.  Seriously, you can’t turn your back for a SECOND without that nasty dog consuming something that no creature on earth in it’s right mind should ever find remotely appealing.  I mean, for real, why would a dog do that?  Does anyone have a reasonable explanation?  I’m not sure if Otis realizes how close he is to not being a member of our household anymore…but one thing for certain that could push Roshare over the edge is one more stunt like that.  I hear there’s a great place up the road called “Happy Tails” that just might have Otis’ name written all over it.

So, I realized this morning that I had never really told the whole story about how the Guitar Auction for Haiti Relief ended up even happening in the first place, much less how unbelievable it ended up ending up. It actually started all because of Twitter. Go figure. I have historically been guilty of arguing at length about the ills of social networking – how it is can often times be a counterfeit and even a distraction to real face-to-face community, how it can spread us too thin relationally, etc, etc. Just ask my friend Keely Scott (KeelyMarieScott.com or @keelymarie on twitter) – we went back and forth over this for months – I think she hated me there for a little while.  And although I now see the light, at least “through a glass darkly” (actually, I still think those ills can be very true but, like most all good things, when used in moderation, social networking can be a really good way to connect) it seems fitting that God would use the very thing I scorned for so long to do such a beautiful work for the people of Haiti. Anyway, Roshare and I decided to make a matching pledge offer to my followers on twitter, mostly just to raise awareness…so for a certain amount of time, for every person who retweeted (RT in twitter speak, “forwarded” to the rest of us) our link to Compassion’s Haiti Relief Fund to their own Twitter followers, the Normans offered to give a $5 donation to the fund. We had hoped to have a response of 200-300 figuring a couple thousand bucks is about all we could manage to give right now. Long story short, we realized pretty quickly that we had GROSSLY underestimated the power of social networking, especially in light of the events going on in Haiti. Overwhelming response. Within a few hours we had over a thousand retweets, and it just skyrocketed up from there. Cool as it was, we were freaking out in the Norman household because we knew there was no way we could afford to match all that. So in an effort to at least try to honor our commitment and maybe raise a little more awareness in the process, we decided to put one of my personal guitars (a guitar builder in Atlanta named Kent Everett had built it for me as a gift 10 years ago) up for a 7-day auction on eBay with 100% of the proceeds going to Compassion’s Disaster Relief Fund for Haiti. So, I signed it, described the guitar and listed a handful of songs that I had written on it in the auction listing, and we posted it – hoping MAYBE we could get a few zealous fans to bid it up to around $5000. The folks from Radio and Publicity at my record label (BEC) got wind of what was going on, and wanted to help however they could – so they decided to put together “a few” interviews over the next couple of days. The response from radio stations all around the country was also through the roof, so I ended up doing about 35-40 interviews over the next couple of days. About halfway through the week of the auction we had met already met our goal (really cool!) and then a day later it had doubled to $10,000 with a ton of folks still bidding!! It was pretty clear once the auction got past this point that this wasn’t about a guitar anymore. I had said over and over in my interviews that I hoped that this guitar could just be a good excuse for someone who might happen to have deep pockets, and an even deeper heart, to give to a cause as worthy as the people of Haiti through an organization as trustworthy as Compassion.  And that’s exactly what happened. Fast forward to the last night of the auction. With less than an hour left, about 5 or 6 bidders were still fighting it out and had the bidding up to $20,000. Needless to say, Roshare and I were completely blown away at this point, but we could’ve never imagined what was coming. Over the next 45 minutes or so, two bidders sort of rose to the top, went back and forth in $100 increments (minimum bid) and had the bidding all the way up to $31,000…again, quite literally freaking out in the Norman household. And then absolutely out of nowhere, what ultimately ended up being the winning bidder, who hadn’t placed a single bid up to this point, mind you, made their first bid with 1 minute, 31 seconds left  – $31,100. To attempt to describe that last minute and a half in our house would be laughable – I mean, the flurry of “hit the refresh button” and jaws dropping and joyful laughter mixed with nervous laughter mixed with utter disbelief.  In that last minute and a half of the auction, the last two remaining bidders took the auction payout up to $51,100.  Absolutely insane.

I emailed with the winner for several days after the auction closed – what seem to be a really sweet-hearted eccentric couple who were just excited to be able to give and requested to remain anonymous. They knew a LITTLE about my music, but had heard one of my radio interview on Sirius/XM and really just loved the idea and the cause.  They paid in full to Compassion a few days later.  And the coolest part?  Their only request was that I keep the guitar.  They want me to either keep writing on it, or put it back up for auction and see if we can’t raise some more money. Unbelievable.

I know this will probably sound melodramatic, but the depth to which I have been effected by this story is difficult to describe. I feel like I’ve seen so many things in it.  I wrote about part of that in my “Nothing Less” blog back on January 20^th, but, again, that was only a small piece of the story.  I think mostly the word that keeps coming back to mind is overabundance.  God’s willingness, the pleasure he seems to take, in providing with absolute overabundance.

the perfect medium for sticker art

And this is my son’s new favorite display for his ‘Cars’ Stickers. Mater is his favorite. My computer…um, life…will never be the same. Wouldn’t trade it for anything. By the way, if you’ve never used Goo Gone, it’s seriously amazing.

Guitar Stand Sippy Cup Holder

This is my son’s new favorite place to store his sippy cup.  Add in a can of latex paint and everything in this picture pretty much sums up what my day has looked like today.  Go figure, words like “sippy” are now a part of my vernacular…how exactly do you capture a word like that in a song??  Maybe I can start writing country music…hmmm.

I’m actually feeling the “mundane-ness” today that I wrote of fearing just yesterday.  It’s just one of those days that feels uninspired.  And I get that what I believe IN is not about what I feel – thank God for that – if it were, Truth would ebb and flow with my every whim and worry.  But part of the problem with the mundane is that a moment of it can sometimes stretch and paw and spread itself out until it settles in as it’s own season in my life.  And when I begin to lose sight of the absolute revelation of – and freedom of – the gospel of Jesus, my focus tends to fall on my failings and my sin.  I suppose, as I wrote in my Annie Dillard blog (1/27/10), I am being dragged through this “low place” and my only necessity is to hang on, to stay fixed and clinched to the Thing that’s dragging me.  Lord Jesus, let me not attempt to figure a way out of this, but simply to hold onto and seek after you.  Let my struggle not be against the sin and un-inspiration that entangle me, but for a fast and strong grip to the Animal that can pull me out of it.  Lord Jesus, I have not been holding fast to you.  That’s all I really want – to hold fast and to fix my eyes on you.  That is the good fight – to fight for you, not against sin.  The moment my focus is on the sin, even in my efforts to fight against it, the sin has won. It has won because it has succeeded in turning my focus from my God.  I don’t want to climb up through guilt toward righteousness; I want to fall down through grace into righteousness.  Yet again, it’s all about perspective.  Do I focus on sin and the guilt that always follows, or do I focus on Truth and the grace that comes with it?  Jesus said, “Spend your energy seeking the eternal life that I, the Son of Man, can give you….This is what God wants you to do: believe in the one he has sent (John 6:27,29).”  There is a reason why commands to turn from sin always seem to be prefaced by commands to simply believe and follow.  In turning toward Truth, we are unavoidably turning away from sin. We cannot face both at the once.

So maybe God is never plainly calling us to fight against anything at all, but only to fight for things. Maybe we’re not to fight against lusts and injustices and the evils of this world, but rather to fight for purity and justice and the Savior of this world. I guess it’s a fairly subtle difference in perspective.  But it seems that subtle difference may be all the difference.  To be motivated by grace toward righteousness.  That is my prayer today, Lord Jesus.  You are good.

I wrote, back on January 16, about the Haiti earthquake – the horror of it all, but also the very real reminder that it had become of what sort of life we’re really called to as believers…how it felt unifying somehow.  And at the end of that post I spoke of my fear that we would inevitably slip back “into the mundane of ‘normalcy’ like moth to flame” and forget that the story is still being told.  We are on the precipice.  Haiti is, sadly, no longer a front-page headline in the media, or in our hearts I fear.  (I suppose I should only speak for myself, but I feel more ashamed when I do).  The truth is, it’s not that we’ve totally forgotten – most of us still pray for and think of the people of Haiti fairly often – but if we’re honest, it doesn’t captivate us like it did, to say the least.  But that’s the way it always seems to go with tragedies, isn’t it?  I don’t know if it’s some sort of coping mechanism to deal with the notion that the very same heaviness that so beautifully brought our hearts to bare might just turn out to be too heavy to keep carrying.  Maybe so.  But I do know that the heaviness is only beginning to bare itself out in Haiti…it’s still brand new there because it’s still all they can see when they wake up each morning – and will be for some time to come.  And even though I am compelled to say that we MUST fight the temptation to “move on” from Haiti, my writing today is not meant to be a guilt-laden plea to do so.  I am leaning more today towards the condition we find ourselves in when we fear or find that we have moved on from such things.  I wrote back in January that for all the heartache that the earthquake in Haiti had brought, that, for me, it also ushered in a sense of purpose and cohesion:

“I know this is sadly selfish, but I felt very “necessary” this week, if that makes any sense.  Not because I felt like I could change the world but because I felt like I was a part of it.  I felt, in a very deep and visceral way, a certain sense of purpose.  I felt like I belonged to a body of believers that was actually living the cause of Christ out in the open, unashamed.  If one can be found at all, I think that can be the “blessing” of tragedy:  that we can, in a moment, identify with the pain of an entire people that most of us had given little thought to before, and that we even feel like we belong to that pain somehow.  That we feel like we belong to the ancient and shared mission of serving that pain with the cause of Christ.  That we feel like we belong to the long-told story of brokenness and redemption.  That we feel like we belong.  Period.”

And then you wake up a day later, a week later, or a year later, and you somehow feel alone again.  Far from the emotion and pull of a tragedy that’s no longer on the news every day, we begin to lose the connection with that moment, and even the connection with the body of Christ.  Even with a house full of children and laughter and marriage, or a community full of friendship and goodness, or a country where we are given every opportunity on the planet to “mean” something if we want to.  Even still, there is always just you, not quite understood, not quite understanding.  There is the inevitable return to the island of isolation, in the long boring middle.  As one of my old favorites, John Gorka, sings, “the meantime is a mean time and we know it….”  And as I’ve said a thousand times, that is where the battle of faith is most viciously fought.  In the mundane.  In the ordinary.

The mundane has not arrived back in Haiti yet, and perhaps it is only beginning to re-arrive for us.  It would certainly do us well to not forget to find a way, ANY way at all, to serve the people of Haiti today, but I also think we should fight to not forget the truth that we have tapped into in this tragedy.  The truth that we are not alone.  The truth that we are not isolated and estranged orphans, but are indeed a part of a body of believing people that want desperately to live the cause of Christ.  I would never dare say that faith is easy in the face of tragedy, but I will say that we, all of us, feel significantly smaller in such times, which, if you ask me, is the yeast of faith.  We are forced to recognize that despite our clawing and conniving and confidence, we simply are not in control, that there are things out there bigger than we are, more powerful.  We are reminded in the face of tragedy that we, all of us, must rely on something or someone other than ourselves, bigger than ourselves, and again, more powerful.  But the challenge of faith when we edge back toward the normal, toward the mundane, is to remember that we are not called to be the center of our world, but rather to center our world on the needs of the people around us.

I had a beautiful weekend with my family.  It snowed about 3 or 4 inches on Friday so I built a fire that evening and we have literally not left the house since.  I don’t really know what it is, but there’s something refreshing about an unexpected event that forces you to change your plans, or maybe just stop for more than a moment or two.  I think that’s partly why I’ve never been a big “stresser” over delayed or cancelled flights – even when they’ve caused me to miss something important or maybe even have to cancel a show or something.  Now don’t get me wrong, there is usually disappointment and a maybe even sadness, depending on what I might be missing, but for the most part I really don’t lose much sleep over it – and actually, in a weird way, I’m realizing that I kind of enjoy it.  Maybe it’s because I know that it’s COMPLETELY out of my control and there is literally nothing I can do to change it, or maybe it’s because I really do subscribe to the whole “everything happens for a reason” cliché (funny how clichés become clichés…usually because they turn out to be true).  I think though that more than either of those things it’s because there’s this little tiny surprise window of freedom in moments like that.  All of the sudden, completely outside of yourself, you’re given back this window of time that was two seconds ago otherwise occupied.  A brand new, unexpected, guilt-free open window.  How many times can most of us say that these days – back in college, for sure, but now?  Everyone that I know has days filled with work or relationships or kids or errands or some combination of them all.  Even for me, a slacker musician who has never had a “real job” (never say that to a musician, by the way), pretty much every single day of my life is mapped out.  I’m a list-maker because I have what might be the worst memory on the planet earth (seriously) combined with a hefty dose of Adult ADD.  So my days are tasked out on my calendar down to the letter.  If it’s not on my calendar, it doesn’t happen – again, not because I don’t want it to, but because I forgot that it even existed.  But every now and then, we’re given that day back on the calendar, empty and open, to be filled with whatever we choose.

Now I realize that 4 inches of snow does not a “snow-in” make, but things here in Tennessee threaten to shut down at the mere mention of flurries, much less when anything actually sticks.  So this was a big deal and seriously EVERYTHING was cancelled.  And the truth is, it’s not like we had any grand plans otherwise for the weekend, but the gift was still given.  Or better yet, it FELT like a gift was given.  And so we crawled through our open window and we did what we had not planned to do, which as it turns out, was not much at all.  We kept a fire burning and showed Smith how beautiful snow is.  Miller slept and ate and poo’d (big shocker), and Roshare made a big batch of her Mom’s vegetable soup that is quickly becoming our cold weather tradition.  We woke up each morning and immediately looked out the window to gauge the accumulation like kids at Christmas.  I worked on (finally) finishing some painting around the house and we watched almost the entire 5^th season DVD of Lost (literally, almost the entire thing) to gear up for tomorrow night’s big final season premier.  All that to say, nothing life-changing happened.  Probably would seem pretty boring from the outside looking in.  But the older I get, the more I like “boring,” and I did get a sweet reminder that whenever I happen to get “snowed in” or find myself with an unexpected open window of time, the people inside the walls of this house are exactly who I want to spend it with.

I recorded a Valentine’s Day promotional video today for my record label.  This sort of video is a fairly normal thing to do for big Holiday promotions…you know, the standard “what’s your favorite gift you’ve ever gotten for Christmas/tell us about your favorite family Christmas tradition” sort of thing, or the ever repetitive “what are you thankful for this Thanksgiving” list, etc, etc.  And no offense to the promotional folks at the label who really do work their butts off to make things happen, but I kind of feel like I might have to draw the line at Valentine’s Day.  And I’m sorry if you happen to be a big box of chocolates kind of gal, but I SERIOUSLY don’t get it.  I mean, if you don’t happen to have a “Valentine” it’s sort of like rubbing it in, and if you do happen to have a Valentine, it’s sort of like rubbing it in.  Maybe it’s because my wife could seriously not care less about it (might just be THE reason I married her), or perhaps it’s because I feel like it’s mostly just a big racket for the flower and chocolate industries, but I find myself a bit cynical about this particular holiday.  Is that wrong?  I mean, is it wrong to feel like if I love someone I should try to let them know it every day, not just this one random day of the year?  Is it wrong to think that it’s much more of a “gift” to surprise my wife with flowers every now and then instead of gathering up the scraps at the flower shop on the day that every lame man on the planet is hunting to “make up for lost time” and maybe, just maybe, get lucky when he gets home?  I don’t know, I’m sure I’m overreacting, but…I don’t think I really care.  So someone told me that when I’m not sure what to blog about on a particular day that I should come up with one sentence that sort of sums it all up.  So here’s my sentence for the day:  Valentine’s Day is d-u-m.  (And yes, I left the “b” out on purpose).