I’d been meaning to download this song for about six months and finally got around to tracking it down on iTunes two days ago.

I really do not know if I’ve heard a song that speaks to humanity’s desperation for God in a universal and intimate way like this one does. It’s devastating.

For the past month I’ve been feeling really convicted about a presentation I gave at Biola’s Journalism conference last year. I couldn’t figure out why it was gnawing at me but I just knew I was wrong in some of what I’d said. Two events this week help me see very clearly where I’d gone wrong. The first was the passing of Larry Norman and the second was finding this song.

My dad gave me one of Larry Norman’s albums a year ago and declared, as he handed it to me, that it was one of his favorite Christian records of all time. I won’t go into Larry’s history or significance, I’ll just encourage you to read his wikipedia page and point out, to you younger readers, that Norman was in the unique and paradoxical position in Chrisitian music to be massive and influential, which meant that he got stones thrown at him from both the Christian and secular worlds, and that because of his influence he inspired people in the secular world you’d never expect; like Frank Black from the Pixies. Crazy.

Then, like I said, two days ago I finally got around to getting this song off of iTunes. I was led to it because I knew that the song playing in the background of a John Piper YouTube video I liked was a Jars of Clay song that sounded interesting. I know nothing about Jars of Clay other than they had one big hit in the 90’s and so I had to do a little investigating. After I figured it out I looked up the lyrics and saved them until I got home from the internet café.

I have never really liked Christian music. I’ve seen it as more often than not, reactive instead of progressive, defensive instead of ambitiously creative – it seems that more often than not Christian art is a parody of secular culture and well behind the curve. I said all this as I spoke at that conference, and then I traced the roots of Christianity’s withdrawal from the arts (and sciences) to Galileo and the Renaissance. I talked about the cultural walls we’d put up to keep ourselves “safe” and to keep the people we didn’t agree with out. In doing so though, we’d stopped influencing culture on an artistic level. I argued that there should only be Christian music that was specifically worship music and not the marketed sub-culture that has grown.

But what I see now, with the passing of Larry Norman, and this song is that if we eliminated Christian music as the umbrella industry it is, we’d be taking away a platform that allows for there to be poetic prophets. Prophets can speak with a guitar as easily as they can with a pen.

The familiar definition of a prophet is one who speaks God’s Word or His will, but there is another social dimension to it. Throughout the Bible, and history, prophets speak from a minority group against a majority group: Moses and Egypt, Isaiah and Assyria and Israel, Jeremiah and Babylon and Israel, and so on. They speak a message that is critical of the dominant power or ways of thought, they show how it will ultimately fail, and they offer an alternative view of the world. They point out social injustices and how far the world and our lives are from what God intended them to be.

Isaiah, Amos, and Moses all did that.

Spurgeon, Tozer, and Lewis all did that.

Those are names we would probably naturally think of if we thought of “prophet”. But would we think of “Larry Norman”? Would we think of the words in this Jars of Clay song? Would we think of Dustin Kensrue (though he’s not within the Christian industry, his words are as sweeping and pointed as any of those mentioned above)?

I want to write more but I have to get to the internet and I want to share this song with you this week.

Read the lyrics as you listen.

A fan of inspired guitars and pens,

Nick

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Jars of Clay - "Oh My God"

Oh my God, look around this place,

Your fingers reach around the bone,

you set the break and set the tone

For flights of grace, and future falls

In present pain all fools say, "Oh my God."

Oh my God, why are we so afraid?

we make it worse when we don't bleed,

there is no cure for our disease.

Turn a phrase and rise again,

or fake your death and only tell your closest friends,

Oh My God.

Oh my God, can I complain?

You take away my firm belief and graft my soul upon your grief.

Weddings, boats, and alibis,

All drift away, and a mother cries...

Liars and fools, sons and failures, thieves will always say..

Lost and found, ailing wanderers, healers always say..

Whores and angels, men with problems, leavers always say..

Broken hearted, separated, orphans always say..

War creators, racial haters, preachers always say..

Distant fathers, fallen warriors, givers always say..

Pilgrim saints, lonely widows, users always say..

Fearful mothers, watchful doubters, Saviors always say..

Sometimes I can not forgive

and these days mercy cuts so deep,

If the world was how it should be, maybe I could get some sleep.

While I lay, I'd dream we're better, scales were gone and faces lighter,

When we wake we hate our brother, we still move to hurt each other,

Sometimes I can close my eyes and all the fear the keeps me silent,

Falls below my heavy breathing, what makes me so badly bent?

We all have a chance to murder, we all feel the need for wonder.

We still want to be reminded that the pain is worth the plunder.

Sometimes when I lose my grip, I wonder what to make of heaven,

All the times I thought to reach up, all the times I had to give up.

Babies underneath their beds, in hospitals that cannot treat them.

All the wounds that money causes, all the comforts of cathedrals,

All the cries of thirsty children, this is our inheritance,

All the rage of watching mothers, this is our greatest offense

Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God.

So sorry for the long absence. A wedding, honeymoon, and preparing to move to Mongolia comes with a list of tasks that keeps my hands off the keyboard. The phrase that's been stuck in my head for the past week or so is, "there is never enough time." Though Kim and I are doing our best I know there will be loose ends here and, even worse, relationships we didn't get to invest in as much as wanted to before we left. It makes my heart heavy.

I'm sure there will be plenty of writing done on that in the future. In the mean time, here's a song that I have this weird mixture of pride and pure enjoyment in when I listen to it.

I've been blessed to have worked at New Noise with some of the most talented guys I've ever met, but at the same time I got to live with some amazing musicians as well. The four guys in Aushua lived in my house together for over a year - two in the house with me and two sharing a bunkbed in a dorm-style arranged garage. I first met Phil when I was at Concordia in 2002 and we sat next to each other in an English class. He answered a roommate ad I placed a few years later and lived with me for a year before his two brothers, Eric and Lee, and their friend Nate moved in.

I've gotten to watch them grow up as a band and as people over the past year especially as they went from a band that looked clumsy and awkward on stage to a band that is commanding and passionate. The easiest, and laziest, comparison you can make about Aushua is that they sound like a young U2 but from all of the VH1 Classic concerts they watched at the house I know they have influences ranging from Echo and the Bunnymen to Bruce Springsteen.

That's what makes a great band now that I think about it; they watch, they listen, they learn. I would come home from work and the four of them would be on the couch with some key bachelor recipe of frozen pizza or some kind of potato dish, attentively watching a classic concert of bands you have to be reminded of. Most bands mimic - like when you walk into a Guitar Center and you hear the endless sea of flubbed Zeppelin or Green Day riffs. Great bands pull pieces from their predecessors or peers and make them their own to the point that its their subtleties that make them truly great and Aushua has that. Their sense of melody in all of the instrumentation will be the first thing that you notice, but that just opens the door to you hearing the atmosphere and space that exists between the layers in their music. Because of their influences their music sounds familiar and new at the same time, but at the same time completely distinct. That distinction is what I'm proud of, the maturity; but thats probably just because I know them.

Anyway, I hope you love it as much as I do and that my small words might give you an appreciation for who they are as a band. Just press play on that little grey player at the top of this post.

You can visit them online at http://www.myspace.com/aushua

I'll write more soon.

There's just not enough time.

Nick

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Having a fiance living in Mongolia makes you a sucker for some really sappy songs. Wait, thats not true. I've ALWAYS been a sucker for songs about longing, especially when they're done with droning and swelling instrumentation, and always when they're done with a girl singer. Don't be fooled though, Maria Taylor still does it with intelligence and sincerity - if her previous band Azure Ray and her connection to Saddle Creek and their ilk are any indication. The most basic comparison I could give is that her music is like if Death Cab for Cutie had a girl singer. It's music for super cool indie films and people who look at the world like cinematographers - and for guys who listen to songs on repeat for an hour and a half.

Anyway, enjoy. I've been loving it.

You can hear more of her stuff at http://myspace.com/mariataylor