The Rough Places

There is a window next to my bed, and no matter how I divert the panels on the blinds, a sliver of morning sunlight always manages to maneuver right into my protesting eyes. Yes, I know what some of you are thinking: “What? You aren’t awake before the sun comes up? You aren’t working hard before the break of dawn? Kid, you deserve what you’ve got coming to you on bright mornings!”

Well to appease the critics of my sleep schedule, I am wide awake in those wee hours before the sun rises, but it’s usually because I have not yet gone to bed, not because I am just waking up. I’m in college, and that’s just how we rabblerousing, young whippersnappers tend to operate.

One particular morning, however, as the light made its assault on my innocent eyelids, I lifted a hand to cover them and opened my eyes. What I saw intrigued me. My left hand was suspended in the air, the light hitting it directly. The shade of my fingertips was distinctly lighter than the rest of my hand. Everything below held the typical, fleshy hue, but those tips were golden and appeared to be filled with the light of the sun.

I held up my right hand to see if the same thing would happen, but the fingers were evenly toned all the way to the tips. The reasons for this, I realized, was that I had formed callouses on my left hand fingertips from years of playing guitar. It’s turned them a few layers thicker and a few shades lighter.

As the glimmer passed through the nearly translucent surfaces of my fingers the color difference created a subtle glow that appeared to be emanating from the skin itself. I won’t lie: it reminded me of E.T. trying to “phone home.” But it occurred to me that those battered, rough places—the constant reminders of hours spent working on my craft—were something like a heavenly badge of honor. The rest of my skin had not been subjected to the same meticulous brutality in the pursuit of excellence, but those tiny places had experienced pain, intensity, and pressure.

There were days after I had been playing for hours that I looked down and saw blood trickling down the face of my guitar because I had split my fingers open. Just like most disciplines, this one required some level of pain. But it’s those places that have been beaten and torn and pushed to the limits that glow; they are the places from which the light radiates.

I drew a comparison to the areas of my heart, mind, and soul that have been “buffed out,” if you will, with the constant strenuous work and even barrages of difficulty and pain that come with relationships.

All of us understand that maintaining healthy relationships is hard work. There are places inside of each of us that have endured through the endless repetitions of love’s harshest challenges. Some areas have been hit so hard that it killed the layers on the surface, just like the times when the skin of my fingertips had been split open and was replaced with new, stronger flesh. The principle holds true: the layers that grow back over damaged places grow back stronger. But sometimes the temptation is to let those replacement layers become a shell—a rough exterior that nothing and no one can penetrate.

How do we keep this from happening? The answer, quite simply, is practice. There is no magic formula for dealing with the difficulties of love except love itself. We keep choosing to do it when it hurts, when it’s hard, when it’s boring, and when it’s easy because skillful hearts, much like skillful hands, can create beautiful things.

We can’t determine what the natural processes of life will do to our hearts, just like we can’t voluntarily make our skin grow. How our hearts form and reform once they’ve been subjected to the elements is outside of our control. And the elements we subject them to are only sometimes in our control. The rest of the time anything goes, and we can’t possibly know what’s going to happen to us. But there is one thing we always get to choose: what we do with our calloused hearts once they’ve had some practice in the joys and jabs of love.

There are always going to be rough places on our hearts just as on our bodies. Relationships can rip away and sand us down. But we mustn’t shy away from the hard work and discipline that creates callouses on our hearts. For perseverance in these things reaps the great rewards of intimacy, and character, and wisdom. Hard flesh on our hearts is a sign of consistent use, not necessarily misuse. It’s only when those hearts start becoming more like stone than flesh that we should be concerned. 

In any case, we don’t get to choose whether or not we have callouses, only if we’ll keep waking up every morning and holding them up to the window of vulnerability. Will we rise, face the day, look at the ones we love with all their flaws and rough places and continue to put our hearts to work in loving them? If we do, we’ll see our hearts grow stronger, and the light that shines through them will grow clearer. We’ll get to build long-lasting homes with the right people, instead of jumping from one hastily built shanty to the next. And when the light streams through us, who knows? We might just get to use those rough places as beacons of hope to lead poor, lost souls on home.

The Prism

A Letter to the Readers:

Please excuse my brief hiatus. Life has been pulling me in many exciting, but time-consuming directions as of late. However, it remains my desire to continue writing and hopefully contributing to new perspectives and being a catalyst for dialogue about important issues. In light of several recent changes in both my personal and business life, I have a wealth of inspiration to draw from in moving forward with "a hundred visions." So, let us trudge forward together into new realms of discussion, reflection, and illumination. Thank you for your companionship on this journey. 

Much love,

J.P.

THE BATTLE 

As I was out for a morning jog recently, I was reflecting on some concepts that have been soaking my prayers. One of them was all of the racial tension in this world, in my nation, in my city, and even in my inner circles as of late. The only way you could deny the reality of this tension is if you are living under a rock (though, I have met a few social cavemen in the past few years). One only need watch the news, read article after article, or even listen to the music of some of this generation's most socially active voices to see that prejudice has not been swept under the rug or forgotten. Even a close friend of mine who was in the Congo for the past year was well-informed and was able to describe the tectonic shift resulting from grinding plates of ethnic differences in America. Indeed, it is being felt around the world. 

Prejudice is a disgusting grime that is smeared across even the young minds of our world, but finally, we have a chance to attack the great deceptions of racial inequality and racial hatred on the ground floor—the mindsets and the spiritual conditions of entire races. This is no longer a war against the government for civil rights or basic human freedoms. This is a mental, moral, and spiritual battle for freedom from crippling mindsets and heart conditions that have enslaved all cultures, not one specifically. I, for one, am excited to take whatever stand I can with those who are being oppressed in mind and spirit, as well as in body. It seems every generation has a battle to fight, and this is ours.

With these thoughts pervading my mind, I penned the words I will now share with you:

“THE PRISM”

We say we want light in this world, but is that really true? It seems as if we have forgotten the very nature of light—that, when it is broken down, it splits into many colors. God created light; God Himself is light, and He does nothing without purpose. We are made to be the light of the world, but we are made to do that together, not just individually.

In creating such a vast array of people with all sorts of cultural, ethnic, and even value system differences, God set a standard—the standard of wavelengths, if you will. He made it so that no one person (except Jesus Christ) could reflect Him in His fullness. But if I reject another’s wavelength, another’s culture, another’s personhood, another’s ideas, because I am overly fond of my own, then any light I could shine is incomplete at best.

I love that God made this principle tangible in a highly visible, unavoidably obvious way—the colors of our skin. We do not need to be colorblind. Quite the opposite, we need to embrace every color on every wavelength (even, and perhaps especially, the invisible ones, who feel the weight of not being noticed) and discover what being the light of the world really means.

An infinite God invested Himself in a diverse people, and I believe He is revealed in a special way when we come together—all parts of the spectrum, loving their own wavelengths and loving those of others. God, send a spiritual rain that lets us see the beauty of the multicolored promise in the sky once again.

“Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.” – John 17:10

Alive: Telling the Whole Story

In the 1800s, short stories were published in magazine publications as an attempt to describe the wide variety of American culture, not simply to entertain readers. Different writers from different regions of the nation would use these works of fiction to describe the culture, the landscape, the philosophy, the faith, and the people of their regions. When these stories were tied together, they formed a tapestry of America—a picture suspended for the rest of the world to see and marvel at the complexity and depth of American life.

Today, the world is very, very different. We have centralized media, and we all share many of the same influences nationwide and even worldwide. We no longer have gaps so wide between the regional cultures of our nation. Or we see them less, at least, because we tend to focus on the elements we all share. We watch the same movies; we use the same social networking sites; we play the same videogames; we listen to the same music; we even read the same books (generally because television tells us what to read). In many ways, our regions, our cities, our families, even our individual lives are aligned in very similar patterns, not because we are uniform deep down, but because we have the tendency to allow these aspects we all share to consume such large portions of our time.

It's time we get back to examining the differences in our stories and the stories of those around us and discover the ways we can help each other grow. What is it about our individual lives that can contribute to a grander, more interesting story of the world? If we take our eyes off of our finely tuned, incessantly edited, entirely unrealistic “newsfeeds” and really look and listen to the people around us, we might discover that the holistic story of a person is much more complex than the chiseled bits of information we can get in 140 characters or less.

I am not here to slam social networking. It has become an inseparable part of the modern story. I am, however, suggesting that we relegate it to the small position it (along with every other component of our lives) should hold and start telling and experiencing the whole story of humankind.

With that said, here are a few reasons we should all start paying more attention to the stories we are sharing and experiencing in the real world, not just the digital one:

• People will not care about your life story until your life has affected their story.

The truth is that most people care first and foremost about themselves. Not necessarily in a selfish way, but people first relate to themselves. When it comes to seeing and understanding the world around them, their own minds are ground zero. Their own experiences build the foundation upon which they layer the opinions and experiences of others. They will process everything about you through the lens of their own stories. No one can simply unzip his or her skin, crawl inside of yours, and live life through your eyes for a day. Empathy only goes so far, but we can create environments for relating and growing with people by making positive impacts on their stories.

If we first show a depth of interest in someone’s story by asking about the events, characters, and experiences that have formed the person he or she is today, we are primed to receive enriching responses in addition to inquiries about our own story. But it doesn’t stop there. If we go out of our way to discover how we can contribute positive new experiences and ideas to this person’s story, both stories are changed for the better and changed forever.

The blunt reality is that most people are not inherently interested in you, but many will be interested as soon as you show interest in them. Be the kind of person who takes the initiative. Care about the stories of those around you, so that the whole story can get better. You are the protagonist of your own story, but you might be an antagonist to someone else and not even know it. It is a sobering thought, but you will only be supporting character at best in the stories of all those around you. So, start asking what role you are playing right now in the stories of those you know. What role could you be playing? It matters.

• You are living a story. Its content is up to you.

Someone someday will tell some aspect of your story. How much of your story, what kind of story it is, and how many people tell it is largely up to you. We need to put some serious thought into the legacies we are leaving behind. It’s obvious that this train of thought isn’t chugging through the minds of many modern Americans. We say we want big things from the future and that we want to make huge impacts on the world. What we forget is that those huge impacts are comprised of single, twenty-four hour days. We write our stories line by line, day by day, second by second, not in large chunks at a time. Each and every moment we live and breathe is a contribution to the overarching legacy we leave behind.

People will speak of the monumental events, the glorious victories, the gut wrenching defeats, the most dramatic episodes of your life. What most stories leave out is the hours upon hours of personal discipline, daily practice, and steady plodding the hero does to reach those lofty aspirations. So many Americans desire the life-defining moments, but disregard the abundance of daily life that those magnificent moments define. We have to come back to a belief in the greatness of small stories: the hardworking men who stay committed to their crafts and the protection and support of their families, the strong, dedicated women who shape our culture with skillful hands, the ordinary people who finish well, even if they don’t finish at the top of the food chain. Some of the most profound stories are not about the people who traveled to distant lands or left footprints on the peaks of the tallest mountains, but the people who learned to love, grow, and build on the humble soil of their youth.

Whatever the story, there is no such thing as too mundane. There is no such thing as an irrelevant story. If you live in the world, you are changing it, like it or not. Your defining moments will be birthed out of your committed life. People will tell of your accolades, but they will know and love you for your consistency.

• Your story is worth telling.

There are so many people in this world with no idea about the direction they wish to travel. So, instead of plunging into the terrifying world of self-discovery, many of us just pick a person we like or respect (or even worse, a person we fear) and just retrace his or her story line as closely as possible. To be frank, this world doesn’t need a single person twice, no matter how great his achievements or charismatic her personality. This world needs you to be you. There are pages in the history of the world waiting to be filled with your life, not the false life of someone you are attempting to be, or the life someone else wants you to live. You have the right and the responsibility to be unapologetically yourself.

You are the protagonist in your story, and as long as you are alive, you are sitting in the middle of the rising action, the conflict, or the climax of your epic tale. Your story matters; it is leading somewhere. No matter how it started, no matter how it has progressed, if you are reading this, then you have not reached the end. Keep telling it.

....

Someone once said, “To be in a viable culture is to be bound in a set of connecting stories…” To be a human being is to do more than tell a story; it is to live a story. We need to strive to become the kind of characters others relate to and learn from. Let’s be the characters with the best character. Let’s stop telling the same story everyone else is telling and live our own. Let’s pry or eyes away from the silver screens long enough to see the golden settings, the colorful symbolism, and shades of theme constituting the backdrop of the greatest tales we will ever tell—our own. 

The Fallout

Tonight, I intend to break from my usual format to share something from a different shade of my mind or a different place in my heart. I was not even planning to write anything tonight, but I cannot seem to shake the urge to share something with you. So, prepare yourselves, readers. Whatever comes out of me now will be honest and perhaps even uncomfortable; I can feel it. 

Here's the ugly truth of it, men are mean, and women are broken. Or maybe men are broken, and women are mean. Either way, hell, both ways, they hurt each other. They hurt each other so badly. But I think they break long before they ever get to that seemingly irreversible stage of constant warfare. I think they break as children, under the oppressive cloud of smoking cannons from which other men and other women fired insults and the explosive results of their own pain at each other. 

Their parents had cannons, but with the progression of our species has come the development of nuclear destruction. With more and more ways to communicate, there are more and more ways to destroy the lives of people one once claimed to love--a picture on a screen here, a snide digital message there, a never-ending stream of what someone wants someone else to think life looks like now. The fight has gone global. The casualties are mounting. It isn't so primitive anymore, nor can it be concealed behind closed doors. The battles are in the streets, on the air as well as in the air. 

The saddest thing is that few of these mean and broken men and women ever mean to expose their children to such toxic air. They never mean to go to war in the first place. In fact, these wars come out of declarations of life-long commitment and peace. Everyone is always assuming that they'll be the exception to the rule. But whoever is making the rules of this sick game doesn't particularly care about exceptions, and he isn't interested in broadcasting the plight of those who manage to live in peace. He's a war-mongering fiend, and his propaganda is so influential, he doesn't ever have to pay for advertisement. The fallout in the lives of his pawns is a beacon seen for miles.

Oh these poor children, carrying their plastic guns around, are forced to breathe this sulphuric mess in and out every day. They are raised up in nuclear war zones, mutated and warped until their lost innocence is nothing more than collateral damage, and then thrusted into a world pretending it isn't on fire and expected to participate in the charades of adulthood. How does one escape that? What can one possibly do to counteract that? How does one keep these little children from pressing all the same buttons, believing all the same lies, hurling all the same showers of destruction on the ones they will love someday? 

As the fights spill into the streets and society becomes more keenly aware of the injustices once perpetuated behind closed doors, does it bring change or just more of the same? Does the smell of blood wreak in our nostrils? How do we solve the greatest problem of all--reconciliation? There are a seemingly-infinite number of variables to consider, and they differ in every human being. And yet, each specific situation, with all it's variables, seems to lead to the same place--brokenness. Broken men. Broken women. Broken children. 

The same ultimate super-problem (the singular combined result of countless miniature problems) seen again and again leads me to believe there must be some ultimate super-answer that can account for each unique element of each unique situation and tie it all together again. What if unity is a choice? What if it isn't an idea striving to be realized, but a person calling out to all who will hear? What if these poor children never have to lose their innocence because their innocence did not belong to them in the first place? Perhaps that innocence is not inherently inside the children themselves, but is the result of the connection they have to someone who provides it. Perhaps that connection is severed, and the answer to this whole mess is that we determine what connection is broken and plug back in to the source. 

Epilogue: 

Is anyone inherently mean? I don't know, but I believe everyone is inherently broken. And the only way to stop this war is not to stifle the meanness, but to mend the brokenness. It is a connection to the source of goodness that will restore goodness. Then, when we connect with our fellow vessels, we can pour goodness into them straight from the source, instead of pouring out whatever nuclear sludge from whatever radioactive rivers we've been storing in our inner reservoirs before we knew better. Those are the waters of death. It's time we found a new river.

I've heard of one. 

Why Our Diamonds Still Look Rough

I have noticed a trend in today's culture of attempting to assign more depth or meaning to any given thing than that thing inherently has. Whether it's the romance in a relationship, the beauty of creation, the thrill of travel, etc., humankind has overemphasized the ability of external things to fulfill inward longings. We, as a species, do this in our pursuit of the ever elusive "more." We desire a deeper plane of life, experience, and feeling and hope to find it in the imagery set before us. 

While life is beautiful, and its experiences are meant to be soaked up and enjoyed thoroughly, I find it selfish that we ask something incredible to be more incredible just because we need it to be. To clarify, we ask something that is already beautiful and valuable in its own right to satisfy a part of us it is incapable of satisfying. 

We all have a deep need that must be satiated before we can fully appreciate the various wonders, complexities, and beauties of life. It cannot be the other way around. It won't be appreciating life that satisfies our souls; it will be the satisfaction of our souls that enables us to appreciate life. God designed us with a deeper need for Him that, if left unmet, will permanently skew our view of all He has made. And no matter how hard we try to assign a little more "magic" here or there, we will never discover what we are looking for. It is this mindset that leads to brokenness in our selves, our relationships, and our worldviews. 

The saddest thing is that, when we ask creation to meet a need that Creator is supposed to meet, we strip creation and Creator of their value in our minds because we have attempted to redefine their job descriptions. It's like asking a tree to bark like a dog or a cow to yield human children. While a tree has bark, it won't be emulating schnauzer noises any time soon. And while a cow is a mammal, we won't be awaiting the sonogram results to find out whether this precious new addition to our world will be Bos taurus or Homo sapien. Both a tree and a cow excel at what they were created to do, but they will be terribly under-appreciated if we expect them to fulfill needs they weren't designed to meet. 

This kind of thinking has cost so many people the warm company of other human beings and the gracious peace of God. It damages our capacity to enjoy the universe God has made. And at the end of this philosophical track, we are still not satisfied.

I implore you, readers, to let God fill that indescribable need for "more" inside of you. Then, and only then, will you be able to appreciate all that He has made for what it is, not for what you want it to be. When we fix the inside, the gems we are fortunate enough to adorn our hearts and enrich our lives with will have perfectly crafted settings. That kind of beauty needs noting extra.

The Gospel as Told by Taylor Swift

Let me preface this article with an important announcement: I am a Taylor Swift fan! Like many newcomers to the world of T. Swift fandom, I did not care much for her music until the release of Red a few years ago. When I first heard that siren's call in the form of Trouble's uncannily catchy melody line, I recognized that this girl was a genius. What her lyrics may lack in poetic elegance, she makes up for with flashiness and relatability. The girl's got style.

Even though I really did love several of the tracks on Red, I kept quiet about it out of fear. At the time, it wasn't cool to be a college-aged male and a fan of Taylor Swift. All of that changed, of course, with the release of 1989. 

Swift's venture into a new genre may have started with Red, but it culminated in her latest full-length studio release. Red was her cocoon, if you will, but in 1989, she emerged a butterfly with a new look, a new sound, and a new attitude to boot. I don't think it a stretch to say that every song on the record is catchy. This album is like a Hostess snack cake for my soul. When my ears want to binge on something that goes down easy but won't do much to change the way I think about the world, I listen to 1989.

Once she made the official switch, thousands of previously non-fans or closeted fans (like myself) came out of the woodwork, unable to live with the lie that we didn't love this pop princess. 

The Swift Shift 

As I was listening to her new album in my car several months ago, the back of my mind started entertaining the general idea for this article. At that time, I had been listening to Taylor Swift's new record almost daily since its release. But in this particular instance, listening made me curious. I asked myself this question: why has the world gone crazy over this? Even though 1989 really is a great record, it seemed to do more than what good records usually do. It started a media revolution of sorts. People went nuts for this album. What was so attractive about it that album sales skyrocketed so quickly? 

While good songwriting and marketing genius definitely share the blame for much of Taylor's success, I think there is something more. Taylor, unlike many huge acts before her, successfully accomplished an artistic metamorphosis. And with the change in her music came a change in her whole presentation. She reinvented herself, and people are eating it up. 

Swift's transformation sends a message that this generation desperately wants to hear: reinventing oneself is possible and can be positive. In a world of dead dreams, shattered families, and broken hearts, the psyche of many young adults and adolescents is wired to be cynical, pessimistic, and doubtful about change. When life puts people down hard enough times, they are less inclined to believe it can do anything else. 

I realized that the "Swift Shift," as I call it, is indirectly preaching a Gospel message. "The old has passed away; behold the new has come." (II Corinthians 5:17) People don't just want catchy melodies and witty lyrics; people want resurrection! People want to believe that life doesn't have to be an endless cycle of the same mistakes, but that they can, indeed, watch an old life die and a new life take shape. 

Through the Red 

I also find it interesting that the symbolism in Swift's album titles lines up so closely with the imagery of the Bible. Taylor Swift's journey to complete musical transformation started with Red. Through Red came a new musical life for this singer. Through the red blood of Christ, new life can come for all those who seek a fresh start. Ephesians 1:7 says, "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace" (emphasis added). We when we emerge, having been washed clean through the sacrifice of Christ, new life is ours. Our habits can change; our minds can change; our words can change; our relationships can change. 

Taylor probably didn't know she was inadvertently preaching the truth of the Gospel, but God's creation will testify to His glorious works, whether it knows it or not. If you want life to change for you; if you want to stop making the same mistakes and living through the same brokenness, Christ offers you that opportunity. After Taylor's reinvention of herself through Red, she entitled her follow-up record, 1989, after her birth year. Christ offers you a new birth year as well. This birth is into the family of God. So, take the journey to a new self, a new birth. You'll emerge as something beautiful when you pass through the red.