Bebo Norman » Blog

Idols of Misdirection

Bebo — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:00:06 +0000

I’m watching the sun rise over California through an airplane window this morning. I am on my way back home again. I don’t know why but there are random moments such as these when I really do understand with clarity the absolute goodness of God. I have struggled lately in a much longer story with feeling a certain separation from the real source of all that is good in my life, but today it is very clear to me. I have been given a life of such richness on so many levels. The irony is, the abundance of life in the form of so many gifts of relationship, and occupation, and love…that very abundance has of late become the source of this subtle distance and, in turn, a seeping emptiness. I am astounded how gifts of such goodness can, with constant and time, become idols of misdirection. Lord Jesus, I thank you this morning for my wife – for her clarity and resolve, her directness and compassion, her unwavering commitment to be who she really is, even as you are changing her heart so much of late, for how much I miss her when we’re apart, for how deeply you have allowed me to fall in love with her. But I thank you especially this morning that you are reminding me that she is not my Savior. She is not my lifeline. She is not you. I thank you also for my two boys…for their purity and curiosity, for their honesty and tears, for the overwhelming sense of security and fullness and drama they magically seem to fill our home to overflowing with, and the fact that they have no idea how beautifully they have wrecked the hearts of their mother and I. But I thank you especially that they are not my Savior. They are not my lifeline. They are not you. I thank you Jesus for this improbable career of writing songs and travelling the world to deliver them to eager listeners with hearts wide open. I thank you Father that you have built a community of believers so vast and rich that just last night I could sit at a table with a group of relative strangers – new friends – and share food that had never before crossed my lips and conversation full of laughter and goodness and quality and depth. From all angles, in distant and familiar places I have had life placed before me that is good and true. And none of it is my Savior. None of it is my lifeline. None of it is you.

Forgive me for my tending toward replacing the source of good things with the good things themselves. What a selfish game to play, to put that on the narrow shoulders of the people and things that I love. To put my joy, my rise and my fall, my very salvation – on the backs of the unequipped. To bind them so carelessly to a weight that they could never carry, to a weight that they were never meant to carry.

Father, this morning I am reminded of my complete and singular identity as a child of God. I am nothing more and I am nothing less. I am neither husband nor father, brother nor friend, living soul nor beating heart but for the grace and the goodness of you. Life lived and taken, love given and received, only at the hands of the goodness of God.

We are flying over the desert now. I am on my way back home again.

The Bronco

Bebo — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:57:26 +0000

It’s 4:30AM and I’ve been up for about an hour. This seems to be my pattern lately for some reason…I usually wake up sometime around 3 with my mind running and I can’t go back to sleep for an hour or so. I’d love to be able to say when this happens that there are some profound “goings on” going on in my brain because it might make me seem deep and introspective so that I may perhaps impress you a bit, but the truth is I usually spend my middle of the night hours mulling over pretty normal everyday stuff like schedules or projects I need to do around the house. This time, for example, I woke up thinking about my garage. Deep. It’s probably because I spent the entirety of the last 3 days cleaning out my garage, so my nighttime brain is just continuing it’s daytime activities. Either way, what seemed initially to wake me up was thinking about my garage, but what’s keeping me up is thinking about what’s in my garage. My 1976 Ford Bronco. Yes, it’s older than my wife and has beautiful curves just like she does. Actually, if you’ve seen the early Broncos, they don’t really have much in the way of curves, but you always hear the real car buffs describing cars like they describe women so I thought I’d give it a try…another attempt at perhaps impressing you a bit. Sorry.

My first car ever was a 1985 Ford Bronco. My father had bought it several years earlier off an Army officer in Ft. Benning. I remember driving down with him and my brother to pick it up…I’m not sure how he found it since there was no internet back then…come to think of it, how did people buy used cars back then?…hmmm…oh yeah, this crazy thing called the classified ads in this other crazy thing called a newspaper…yeah, I’m pretty sure my dad found it in the classifieds of the Columbus Ledger Enquirer. At any rate, I remember we turned onto a really shady tree-lined street down in Ft. Benning and in one swift and life changing moment my love affair with the Ford Bronco was born. It was a dark metallic gray standard 3-speed with maroon vinyl seats and no air conditioning. I was in love. I drove that Bronco through thick and thin all the way through college. It seems insane now to think that I spent summers in Georgia with no air conditioning but I remember burning my legs on those vinyl seats like it was yesterday. When I would make the 5-hour drive back and forth to college in South Carolina, it was like a Sunday stroll in a wind tunnel – every window was down going 70 on the interstate and I would literally have to change clothes upon arrival because of the “seat sweat” as I called it. Sounds glorious, huh? It really was…even though I did vow to never EVER own another car without air conditioning. I honestly could write an entire book on the memories I have in that old Bronco from first dates to first wrecks (not much difference between the two in my experience), but I think any of us could probably say the same about our first car. The point is, after college I had to get more practical to drive myself around the country playing shows, so I bought a Subaru Outback station wagon that could fit all my gear and still get good gas mileage. I seriously think that Bronco probably got about 11 miles to the gallon, but I also remember being appalled when gas got above 99 cents back then. That thing had a MASSIVE gas tank (probably close to 30 gallons) and I remember being riled up if I had to put more than a 20 down to fill it up. Anyway, after I wore out my Subaru, I splurged on a 1997 Land Rover Discovery that I put 150,000 miles on in just over 2 years. I had a brief affair with a Toyota Tacoma pickup somewhere in there but the point is this: they all paled next to my Bronco. And even though my first one was of the 80’s OJ Simpson variety, I have especially always loved the early model Ford Broncos (1966-1977) because they were the originals built to compete with the Jeep CJ-5 and the old International Scouts – the 3 grandfathers of the modern SUV. So after briefly owning and totaling a ’74 Bronco (another story for another day), I found this 1976 about 6 years ago. It was in pretty bad shape when I bought it but I drove it for about 2 years with the idea that I would be it’s savior and friend and do all the work myself. I successfully completed a whole host of small jobs, but long story short, my first big rebuild project started one Saturday afternoon and my Bronco didn’t run again for 2 years (enter Toyota Tacoma). So after conceding the fact that I am not the man’s man I’d always hoped I’d be and that I would NOT in fact be my Bronco’s messiah (although we are still friends), I began the long search for someone to undo what I had done. Fast-forward another 2 years and the stone has finally been rolled away and my Bronco has emerged from its Bebo-induced cryogenic chamber.

The blessing (if you ask me) and the curse (if you ask my wife) is that when you own a restoration, the restoration is never complete…there is always more to restore. So as I often do on weekends or days off, I spent yesterday working on a few Bronco projects – installing rear seatbelts and building a pulley lift in my garage to hold the hardtop when I take it off on sunny days. I really do love that sort of thing. It’s hard to understand how little projects like that, mindless in so many ways, can also really give me life. But the reality is that something good happens in my spirit when I work with my hands to repair or rebuild something. As tempted as I may be to get all melodramatic and draw some comparison between a restored Bronco and restored soul, I shall not. Instead, I’ll just give you a few pictures I took this morning. And although her curves look nothing like my wife’s, she is indeed a beauty. And she (now) has air conditioning!

The River

Bebo — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:34:50 +0000

There isn’t any place on the planet that I would rather be than exactly where I am at this exact moment…sitting on the front porch at our family’s river cabin down here in Georgia. My wife says it’s unfair to call it a cabin because after 30 years and a handful of renovations, it’s really more of a house now, but all I know is that when I was about 3 years old, my father paid $7500 for a two-bedroom, tin-roofed CABIN. My wife is also prone to remind me that anyone with any sense would also lose the “river” part and just call it what it is, a ”lake house.” Which makes sense to the casual observer since, well, it is technically on a lake. But if you want to get technical about it, it’s technically a reservoir, and last I checked reservoirs are TECHNICALLY just dammed up rivers. So, as far as I’m concerned, it will always be known as it has always been known (at least to my family), the RIVER CABIN. My grandmother, Nonnie, made up a song that we would sing as kids on the way to the river from town…it’s a clever little tune creatively titled…you ready for this…“We’re Goin’ to the River.” (Perhaps that was the beginning of my own journey towards songwriting…inspired by the deep and introspective rhyming of words like “sun” and “fun”). So seriously, would Roshare really have me turn my back on something like that…on the very words of my late grandmother? After all, the song wasn’t called “We’re Goin’ to the Lake House.” When my dad bought this place back in 1976, it really was the true definition of a cabin – there was no real running water, only a pump that pumped water from the river up a long black hosepipe that lead under the cabin and into the toilets and the two sinks (yes, we had toilets…still do, in fact). Lord knows you didn’t want to brush your teeth with any of that water, but believe it or not, we did. My parents did, however, know well enough to forbid us from drinking any of it, so one of my least favorite chores as a kid was hauling the dozens of Nehi Soda jugs filled with fresh water from home into the cabin from the car. Now that I think about it, we also had a rusted out metal shower in the bathroom fed with the same river water, but I can’t really remember anyone except my grandmother ever using it. My father always kept a bar of Ivory soap on the dock near the shallow end so we all just bathed in the river. The good thing about Ivory Soap is that it floats, which comes in handy when it inevitably slipped from your hands it into the muddy river water (lake water, whatever). And even though most of you probably think of Georgia as a really backwoods place, it wasn’t like the whole family got naked and took baths in the river together…we all kept our bathing suits on – giving literality to the term. And the truth is, it’s a ritual that all these years later, despite the ever-available accoutrements like indoor plumbing, I’ve been unwilling to give up on…much to my wife’s chagrin. Another one of my least favorite chores as a kid was picking up literally tens of thousands of pinecones in the yard with my brother and sisters – we had a father-enforced 30-minute pinecone pick-up every weekend we were here (and that included any friends that we might have brought with us). And even though we dumped wheelbarrows full of pinecones onto the burn pile, I SWEAR there were more on the ground when we finished than when we started. My father would disagree, but I think it was just a cruel joke he and God were playing on us. The hard part was dodging the nettles (little white flowers that had itchy thorns on them) with our bare feet. You’d think we would have learned to put shoes on, but as far as I was concerned, shoes and shirts didn’t exist when you were at the river. My dad decided one summer that he wanted grass in the yard instead of all rocks and pine straw, so he made a deal with our neighbor Mr. Haynes for my older brother and I to dig up sprigs of St. Augustine from his yard and transplant them into ours. So on my father’s prodding, Chris and I would head to Mr. Haynes place every Saturday that summer each armed with a 5-Gallon Buckets and a 9-inch steel tree spike. We would use the tree spikes to dig up the sprigs of grass by the roots one-by-one and then throw them in our buckets until they were full, then head back to our place to reverse the process. My dad and Mr. Haynes insisted that St. Augustine was some sort of a “runner-grass” that would spread out over time and we’d have a beautiful full lawn, but as far as my brother and I were concerned it was like trying to put out a house fire one spoonful of water at a time – just another exercise in futility that we were certain my dad and Mr. Haynes had cooked up just to get a good laugh. After Hurricane Opal came through back in the early 90’s my dad and I planted a handful of Maple trees to replace the two-dozen or so pines that we lost in the storm. By that time I was old enough to actually enjoy the idea of doing work with my hands, and especially doing that sort of work alongside my father. My brother, my dad, and I built the docks here as well – they’ve since been resurfaced many times over, but several of the old creosote posts that we planted in the lakebed over 25 years ago are still in place. The retaining wall that we built out of old railroad crossties and the old boathouse have both long since been replaced as well, but I can still remember the songs on the radio that we sang to and drinking water from those Nehi jugs when we’d take a break and sit in the shade for a few minutes. At the time, I remember feeling like so many of those jobs were torture, and the truth is, it really was hard work for a little kid. But I also remember feeling more like a man than a little kid sweating and working there next to my big brother and doing what little I could to help my dad hold a two-by-four in place. I’m notorious to this day for telling all those stories over and over again to anyone who comes here to stay with us…it usually happens when we go out for our daily sunset boat ride so if you happen to be one of the unfortunate souls who picks a seat back near the captains chair you get an earful whether you like it or not. The really amazing thing is that I can ride up and down this river and point out an old stone retaining wall here or a boathouse there that my dad built with his dad back when he was just a kid. I never got to meet my father’s father, but when I can see with my own eyes a thing or two that he built, that are still standing after all this time, it makes me feel proud to be his grandson. And oddly enough, telling those stories makes me feel like he’d be proud of me too. I think part of what I love so much about this place is that there are stories everywhere I look. I feel more a part of this place than anywhere else I’ve been in this world. I feel more at peace here than anywhere else. And I think it’s because I am literally IN this place. Just like my big brother. And my father. And his father.

My 3-year old son, Smith, just came out on the porch with me because he wanted me to “hold you” for a few minutes before he went down for his nap. And as I looked out at our old silver wood docks running out from a beautiful lawn thick with St. Augustine and shaded by fully grown Maples, I kept thinking how much I hope he can come here someday and tell stories about the things that he built and the things that he planted with his father.

Perch

Bebo — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:22:26 +0000

I wrote yesterday about my unsuccessful five-year search to find a “perch” here at our home in Franklin – a place for reflecting and resting and reading in the mornings. A place to look out from, with a bit of a view, but mostly a place that provides perspective. This morning, by random occurrence, I found myself sitting in a chair that I never sit in. It’s a great chair, a leather chair that sits in a certain corner of our Great Room. I bought it years ago because I wanted it to be “my” chair. Growing up, my father always had “his” chair – a HUGE and unashamed recliner complete with plaid pattern and a wooden pull lever – and anyone and everyone who visited our home was welcome to sit in that chair for just as long as he or she liked…until the moment my father walked in the room. It was never domineering, just always understood. That was Papa Lev’s chair. To this day I celebrate my father’s recliner as often as I possibly can (it’s seriously that comfortable – anything that large has to be that comfortable), but the very second my father walks in the room, even as a 36 year-old man I’m overcome with an anxious respect and awe that requires that I vacate immediately (unless I want to get a rise out of my Dad…which is a pretty good time in and of itself). And so I always looked forward to a chair of my own once I had a place of my own. Now, I knew that I couldn’t go the way of my father’s chair with its hyper-pronounced presence. I’m a little too fashion forward to stomach the overstuffed and oversized recliners of my father’s generation. And so, some 10 years ago, after a thorough and arduous search, I found the perfect chair to be “my” chair – contemporary without being modern, unassuming but very inviting. And though you’d NEVER know to look at it, hidden beneath its sleek brown leather exterior lies a deep and profound secret. It is indeed…a recliner. It’s a glorious chair. The problem with this chair has never been comfort, appearance, or glory. The problem with this chair has always been placement. It looks so beautiful where it sits – balancing perfectly the angles of the room with the color palate of the walls, artwork, and the very large deep red chenille sectional (sorry I’m getting so HGTV on you). But the corner that it sits in doesn’t really have a great view of the TV – there’s a bit of a glare from a certain set of windows – and it’s sort of set away from the other groupings in the room, so it’s not even the best for conversation. But man it looks good in that corner, so that corner is it’s home. And as a result, it has never proven to be the “my chair” that I always hoped it would be. I tend instead to have found an equally fulfilling, but very different experience “working the corner” (a phrase coined by my brother, Chris) of the sectional couch – no window glare on the TV, perfect angle for viewing and for conversation, and in perfect foot reach to the large leather ottoman/coffee table that sits in front of it. But amazing as working the corner is for watching TV, it’s no perch at all – no view out of any sort, no inspiring perspective. So I have tried in vain for years to find my perch in our home. As I wrote yesterday, our front porch is perfectly suited and often used, but it’s still a bit too cold out in the mornings to settle in this time of year. This morning though, I was up early, before Roshare or the boys. While roaming and pondering where to settle in to read Don Miller’s new A Million Miles, in an effort to pick up a few toys scattered around, I sat briefly in my old leather chair that has been so underused and lonely all of these years. And as I looked up, I was astonished to realize that I had missed this all this time. With the TV off, I noticed the early morning light making it’s way in through a set of east-facing windows across the room. These were the same windows that made the old brown chair horrible for watching TV because of the glare. But for reading, TV glare is not an issue, and in fact the view through those windows kept going – out over our little courtyard and into an open area of back yards and neighbors homes and through a break in the street to the next block over I could see rooflines and chimneys. Quite a place to look out from as it turns out. A new perspective to say the least. And so I sat and I gazed and I wondered at how odd to have missed this view for all these years. That in one moment, this chair was just something to pass by on my way somewhere, and in the next, it was a new vantage point, my perch.

After a good little while soaking in the morning, I finally opened Don’s book to a chapter that started with a simple and fairly passing phrase about the fact that his uncle had died this past year. I took it for what it was, everyone’s uncle dies, and moved passed it without much thought. But then Don, in the way Don does, brought perspective into play, he brought story into play, the story of his uncles life – his larger than life, life. And in a few brief moments I found myself drawn to this character, wishing I’d know him, wanting my life to look more like his. And as Don sweetly closed the chapter with the funeral of his uncle, I found myself deeply engaged, moved, and crying. All alone at the break of day, holding a book, and crying in my old brown leather chair.

It’s all about a vantage point…the right place to look out from. This old brown leather chair gave to me this morning that very thing. And so did my friend Don. And in those two things, an unused chair and an uncle I’ve never met – both passing thoughts just moments before, I found a new perspective that let me feel deep and beautiful things that I’ve not felt in quite some time. I’m thankful for that this morning. So thankful.

A Place to Look Out From

Bebo — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:58:47 +0000

So, I’ve been looking for the 5 years that we’ve lived in our house down here in Franklin for the perfect place to sit and read in the mornings. It’s kind of like finding the right table at a restaurant or, better yet, the right seat at the right table at a restaurant. You never want to be seated out in the middle of the room – you need to sort of be backed up against something so that you can look out and see all the other patrons, but not be surrounded by them, so that you can hear the rumblings of all the other conversations but still be fully engaged in your own. One of our favorite restaurants here in town is Flemings on West End up in Nashville. Roshare and I always call ahead and request a “back booth” because not only are they set beautifully on the back wall against the second story windows but the booths are actually slightly elevated for a nearly perfect vantage point. (I saw Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman there one night from my back booth vantage point – they were at a “regular” table – poor kids). It seems like every place I travel to I look for that spot to sit and be quiet in the mornings – the back lounge of our tour bus…out of the way but always with a window view, the screened porch down at the River in Georgia, a certain window-filled spot that looks out over the field below my parents’ house when we’re down visiting them. The truth is, our front porch here at our house is pretty much the perfect place were it not for the colder seasons and stormier days. It’s almost getting warm enough this time of year to venture outside, but the mornings are still a bit too cold for my pansy musician self. Even still, when it’s really calling, I’ve been known to bundle up in layers of warm clothes and brave the cold just for a good morning sit on the front porch. I was talking with my friend Al not too long ago about this very thing and he asked me to describe what it is exactly that I’m looking for. After one of my typically long and rambling explanations, partly for clarity but mostly for defense of my sanity, Al said I was really just looking for a “perch.” He went on to explain that the beauty of perches – turns out he’s a fan as well – is that by definition they are elevated for view and they are “set apart” for safety and for resting. He said it’s all about a vantage point, a place to look out from. One of my favorite things about guiding backpacking trips out west years ago was that almost every route we did crossed over the Continental Divide at some point or another. From those sorts of high places you get perspective, a sense of space that shows on some level where you’ve come from and where you might be headed…physically, emotionally, spiritually. Obviously, my morning perch is far from the top of the Divide these days, but the concept is the same…a place to look out from. A place that is safe, that gives perspective, a place for resting and reflecting. Truth be told, I spend less time in the mornings reading than I do just gazing. Dreaming maybe. Wondering. Hoping. And from my perch, wherever it may be, by the time I finally get around to the reading, it seems that the stuff of those pages has more room in my spirit to come alive, to mean something.

Daybreak

Bebo — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:56:06 +0000

I woke up for the day at 4:30 this morning, certainly not according to plan. I can’t for the life of me think of a rational reason to intentionally wake up at 4:30 in the morning. Ever. The long and short of it is that I tend to not sleep as well in general when I’m in a season of writing…if I stir even slightly in the middle of the night, my brain tends to flip it’s switch and start running away with things. Add in the typical night-time interruptions of a 3-year old and an 8 month old and the trio makes for a lot of early mornings or late nights, depending on your perspective. This morning I woke up with a song idea in my head, and as with most song ideas if I don’t record them or write them down immediately, they will most often be lost forever. Some writers say that if you can’t remember an idea a few hours or even days later that it’s not worth remembering. I, on the other hand, like to think that most of my best songs ever are lost songs – forgotten somewhere between waking up and falling asleep again or driving down some interstate when I couldn’t reach my recorder packed away in my backpack in the trunk. Or at least that’s what I used to like to tell myself. A friend of mine once suggested that I keep my recorder next to my bed so that when I woke up with song ideas I could empty my mind of them right away and then roll over an go right back to sleep. Not a good idea. I’m already a pretty irrational sleeper – MAJOR sleep-talker, and when I was younger a sleep-walker (way to many stories to tell in one blog – but a good blog idea nonetheless…note to self). So, the reality of things, at least according to my brief experiment with the bedside recorder, was that when I woke up the next morning I usually didn’t even remember recording anything in the middle of the night. So it was rarely until weeks later that I happened to pick up my recorder in an actual middle-of-the-day conscious and rational hour and find myself thoroughly horrified at the imposter that must have stolen it at some point when I wasn’t looking and recorded some cruel joke of a song on it. Seriously, they were that bad. So the only thing that little experiment succeeded in was robbing me of my theory of lost songs. Now I’m content to let my “dream songs” just stay dream songs. But then there are the moments like this morning. This wasn’t a dream song, it was a real one. One that I’ve actually been working on for years (seriously) – but have never found the right chorus too. As my eyes opened and the melody started stirring, I realized quickly that all hope of sleep was lost. But on mornings like this one, it didn’t matter. It was still dark out, and rainy, and there was a beautiful melody playing in my mind that was still beautiful even after I was mildly coherent. I love writing songs. And this one felt like daybreak. Not so much a sunrise, but a grey and rainy and beautiful daybreak. I’ll let y’all hear it soon, if it stands the test of time.

In My Own Way

Bebo — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:11:11 +0000

I hope you’ll forgive that I’ve been so out of touch with my blog lately. Part of the problem is that over the last few weeks I’ve gotten busy out playing shows again and working on writing/pre-production for the new record when I’ve been back in town. It’s a bit inevitable that when I start travelling/writing/recording again after a nice long break, I still struggle quite a bit with balance. There seems to be a consistent tension between my time to myself for creating and my time with my family and face-to-face community and even now with time wanting to somehow keep in touch with the larger, more extended community that I might not even know on a personal level. The truth is, there is definite value to all of the above…but my unashamed first priority is to “the people to my right and my left.” The truth is also that there is plenty of time. The reality it seems though is that my default tends toward serving my own time at the expense of all the others. My intent is to balance those things well, but I tend to get stuck somewhere in between. My struggle this morning is the understanding that in all my efforts to “love well” here at home I still tend to fail at it a lot. I think a large part of it for me is the whole clichéd “love language” thing – where I tend to love people the way that I want to be loved rather than how they need to be loved (as usual, clichés are clichés for a reason). Ultimately, it just comes down to selfishness. The battle with self – against self – is really at the core of all struggle…of all sin. The great irony is that it seems that everything our cultural prophets preach is all about serving self…how I feel, how I hurt, what I want, what I need, my goals, my ambitions, my dreams, my hopes. The other even greater irony is that there does indeed have to be a profound level of self-awareness in order for us to truly embrace what it means to NOT serve ourselves. In other words, if I want to truly love well and serve the people around me, I have to know myself well enough to get out of my own way. I think that in order to “die to ourselves” we have to know what we’re dying to. I spent a lot of years in my life existing in a place of what I called humility and kindness and even self-sacrifice before realizing that my “versions” of those things were really subversive ways to get the people around me to respond to me in a certain way…to get people to like me. Yes, I was nice to people and maybe even did “good things” but I was well into my 20’s before I realized that, at the real core of it, I was less interested in how those “self-less acts” made the recipients feel than I was in how their response to those acts made ME feel. Not very self-less after all. Does that make any sense? I’m not sure that I’m communicating this very well…a bit stream of consciousness, I suppose. The frustrating thing on a day like today is to feel like in all this time, maybe I haven’t come quite as far as I thought. I say all the time that the core cause of Christ, in Jesus’ words, has very little to do with us, and most everything to do with the people around us, but I’m pretty certain today that it’s easier to say that than to live it.

Lord Jesus, my prayer this morning is that you would make me just self-aware enough to turn whole-heartedly against being self-absorbed. That you would teach me how to truly recognize the needs of those around me and to serve those needs with no expectation, no need for response. Maybe that’s an unrealistic prayer, but I want to believe that there is a way for the response of your spirit within me to be my only hope, my only expectation. Not because I can earn even a fraction of your favor or your grace, but because it is a celebration of that very favor and that very grace to serve you by serving the people around me.

Bojangle’s

Bebo — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:34:19 +0000

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.

The Hardest Thing

Bebo — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:23:21 +0000

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.

Happy Tails to You

Bebo — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:44:28 +0000

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.