Saturday, June 28, 2008

What's so amazing about grace?

It's 1:11 am as I start this, and I wonder if I can begin to say what I am thinking. No, really, its not as easy as all that. To express all my frustration with myself, my sense of failure in struggling against the flesh, my overwhelming lack of hope.... I don't have words for it, and for that, I am glad. I don't want to make it real, like words will do. I'd rather it stay as inarticulate as possible.

Except for this. I saw WALL-E Friday afternoon, and I was blown away. Fantastic movie, but what got me was a small, almost throwaway line.

"I don't want to just survive. I want to LIVE."

I didn't dwell in the theatre, caught up in the beautiful animation and the heartwarming story coming to live. But how true is it, that we exist in survival mode?

Thinking about it now reminded me of a Nichole Nordeman song, called, ironically enough, Live. The song's emphasis is life beyond the mountaintop experiences, in the mundane and ordinary, and its so pertinent to my life right now I am floored. More than I should be, because there hasn't really ever been a time when my life doesn't find corollary to her music.

Did you come that we might just survive?
Did you come so we could just get by?
Did you walk among us
So we might merely limp along beside?

I was bound, I have been set free
But I have settled for apathy
Did you come to make me new
And know I’d crawl right back into the skin you found me in?

It’s where I am, not where I’ve been

You make me want to live
You make me want to live
You came to shake us
And to wake us up to something more
Than we’d always settled for
And you make me want to live

We’ve all been up on the mountain top
A golden glow that’s bound to soon wear off
Then it’s back to the mundane telling tales of glory days
When we were hopeful that this change was here to stay

So why would a young man
Live in a waste land
When the castle of his dreams is standing by?
Why would a princess
Put on an old dress
To dance with her beloved and a chance to catch his eye?

To say this fixes everything is a lie. Yet....I don't feel quite so defeated. I hope.....oh how I hope that will continue. That I will continue. That change will continue.