Songs for the rest of your life

So I finally downloaded Spotify the other night and ended up listening to an album I actually do already own: Don Chaffer's What You Don't Know.  Do you know this album? There are lots of people writing lots of songs obviously, but in the Christian music realm I have a very hard time finding songs that I can connect to. My friend Daniel and I are sharing some stories of grief in our lives lately and he told me how Christian music is often so hard to relate to. He said the majority of those songs are indicative of only about 1% of his actual day-to-day reality. They are rarely honest enough to access the rest of his life. 

It's been a few weeks since Daniel told me that, still it resonates within me. Stanley Hauerwas locates sentimentality as a major problem in a video I just watched . We mostly write to say the things we like to hear, instead of writing to say the things we need to hear. Who will write the songs for the 'rest of your life' - I mean the 99% that cannot honestly say "Oh God you are my all!" "I long to praise you in this place" every hour of every day? (I once, in a fit of honesty, wrote a song called 'You're not my everything, Lord")  Who will write the songs like this...

LORD, you are the God who saves me; 

   day and night I cry out to you. 

 May my prayer come before you; 

   turn your ear to my cry.

  I am overwhelmed with troubles 

   and my life draws near to death. 

 I am counted among those who go down to the pit; 

   I am like one without strength. 

 I am set apart with the dead, 

   like the slain who lie in the grave, 

whom you remember no more, 

   who are cut off from your care.

 You have put me in the lowest pit, 

   in the darkest depths. 

 Your wrath lies heavily on me; 

   you have overwhelmed me with all your waves. 

 You have taken from me my closest friends 

   and have made me repulsive to them. 

I am confined and cannot escape; 

  my eyes are dim with grief.

   I call to you, LORD, every day; 

   I spread out my hands to you. 

 Do you show your wonders to the dead? 

   Do their spirits rise up and praise you? 

 Is your love declared in the grave, 

   your faithfulness in Destruction? 

Are your wonders known in the place of darkness, 

   or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?

 But I cry to you for help, LORD; 

   in the morning my prayer comes before you. 

 Why, LORD, do you reject me 

   and hide your face from me?

 From my youth I have suffered and been close to death; 

   I have borne your terrors and am in despair. 

 Your wrath has swept over me; 

   your terrors have destroyed me. 

 All day long they surround me like a flood; 

   they have completely engulfed me. 

 You have taken from me friend and neighbor— 

   darkness is my closest friend.

You can't end a song that way! Where's the redemption, where's the resolution? We hate it when we can't just 'make it all okay'. The writer of Psalm 88 here was honest enough with himself, God and us to not go any further than right where he really was. The grip of grief is in my life and yours and everyone's got a sermon to preach about how to fix it, how to make it okay ASAP. It's so good to hear a song that makes room to breath in the deathly silence of all that can go wrong, when you're not sure if there will be anything after the aftermath. 

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were frustrated in their time because they could not find the stories that they wanted to read. Do you know what their answer was to the problem? They decided to write those stories themselves. Those guys were geniuses, I am not, but that challenge sticks.  It's a good challenge to me. I'm thankful to Jesus for those who've taken up that challenge in song like Don Chaffer, Mark Heard, Eric Peters, Rich Mullins, Fernando Ortega and many others. 

Any favorite songs, stories, writers for you? Leave a comment and help me find them...