April 2007

One of the things I wanted to do before we left Nashville was see at concert at Ryman Auditorium.  The Ryman Auditorium is this big, old church, with the pews still in it, the one time home of The Grand Ole Opry.  It is a legendary music venue.  It’s very simple and basic, with not much in the way of extras.  It’s just the musicians and a little lighting.  The music and the songs are the focus.  So, you can’t just go see anyone perform at The Ryman.  It has to be someone who’s musical abilities shine in that type of setting, who can be at their best in the stripped down environment.  Norah Jones fit that description for my wife and I, so, last night, my wife and I went to the Norah Jones concert at the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. 

Ever since moving to Nashville, Elizabeth and I have both had to work.  Due to our committment to have one of us always at home with our kids, our work schedules have been a little crazy.  One of us worked at night, the other one in the mornings.  The evening of the Norah Jones concert was the third night in a row that Elizabeth and I had been able to be together.  When you have a schedule like we’ve had, it takes a night or two to get reacquainted with one another, to catch up on what has happened the last few days.  But by then, it’s time for us to go back to work again.  To have three nights in a row, is like magic.  I’m not sure when the last time was that this has happened.  It’s that third night where you get past the catching up, the reacquainting and you are really able to connect with one another.  We didn’t plan it this way, it just kind of worked out, that we could be together, arms around each other, in the third row of the Ryman Auditorium soaking up the sweet sounds of Norah Jones. 

Her first song was Come Away With Me, and as the words left the stage and entered my mind, I was hit with a realization.  I love my wife.  Our life since living in Nashville has been this giant mix of stressful situations, emotional struggles of growing, heartbreaking glimpses of our true selves.  Yet, my wife sits here with me, leaning her head on my shoulder at a Norah Jones concert at the Ryman Auditorium.  A peace flows through me, that our relationship has survived this Winter in Nashville, and a foundation of lasting love has been established.  Leaving all that we knew and were familiar with and coming to Nashville was risky.  Our relationship could have been shattered to pieces.  But here we are at the Ryman Auditorium, in Nashville, Tennessee, listening to Norah Jones, as she helps us to celebrate our journey. 

Come away with me in the night
Come away with me
And I will write you a song

Come away with me on a bus
Come away with me where they can’t tempt us
With their lies

I want to walk with you
On a cloudy day
In fields where the yellow grass grows
knee kigh
So won’t you try to come

Come away with me and we’ll kiss
On a mountain top
Come away with me
And I’ll never stop loving you

And I want to wake up with the rain
Falling on a tin roof
While I’m safe there in your arms
So all I ask is for you
To come away with me in the night
Come away with me

Dear Friend,

It’s been some time since we have spoken.  Time has allowed for clarity of perception.  I believe the saying is, that hindsight is 20-20.  My heart breaks with the understanding that I now have.  You were stuck.  The agony you must have faced every night, as you lay in bed, wanting peace, wanting rest.  It’s an agony felt by many, but this version is more powerful as it uses the guilt of religion to freeze you, to keep you from breaking free.

You wanted your small start-up to be successful.  You put alot of hours and emotion into it.  You wanted it to succeed because you wanted it to make a difference.  You needed it to succeed because your mortgage, your medical bills, your family depended on it.  The duty of man to provide for his family.  No one can blame a man for assuming his natural role.  Unfortunately, you tried to assume it in an unnatural way.  Ever since the Israelites begged God for a King, man has wanted to be ruled over by man.  It’s not the way it was meant to be.  But it is the system that our American church follows.  It has become an honorable profession to rule over man in an American church.  A profession that you committed yourself to.  And one that doesn’t always pay well.  Which leads us back to man’s natural role of providing for his family.  Our natural duty eventually becomes the stronger motivator for our choices.  When forced to choose, the choice that keeps the family provided for will usually win.  And it did for you.  Honorably so.  It doesn’t even seem fair.  It isn’t really.  Man wasn’t ever intended to make a living this way.  But it is the current system.  The current system sucks.

Godspeed,

Choose to believe something different. 

 ”You all have a single Teacher, and you are all classmates.  Don’t set people up as experts over your life, letting them tell you what to do.  Save that authroity for God, let Him tell you what to do.  No one else should carry the tilte of Father, you have only one Father, and he’s in Heaven.  And don’t let people manuever you into taking charge of them.  There is only one Life-Leader for you and them…Christ.”

Matthew 23: 8-10 (read all of 23 to grasp the greater context)

   

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. . . . You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Angela Carter (1940 - 1992)

I’ve tried to compile a list of all the books I’ve read in the last three years.  In trying to change my perspective on life, I devoured books.  Anything that might help shape, form, inspire, challenge.  From fiction, to sociology, to trying to understand who Jesus really is…here’s the list, in my own, not so scientific system of organization.  As I look through it, there is definitely a thread of trying to grasp a deeper, broader, less white middle class conservative Republican way of understanding God, that runs through this list.  There is much more to be read and much more to learn. 

The World is Flat

Tuesday’s With Morrie

The Wedding

The Alchemist

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop - A History of the Hip Hop Nation

Social Problems:  A Critical Approach

The Barbarian Way

Velvet Elvis

Making Room for Life

Till We Have Faces

Here’s To Hindsight

Let Your Life Speak

The Glittering Image

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance

In Search of God Knows What

The Razor’s Edge

Total Money Makeover

Bowling Alone

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

Good to Great

Savage Inequalities

Divine Conspiracy

Moneyball

The Hobbit

Three Nights in August

The Slaughterhouse Five

Freakonomics

Excavating Jesus

 Our time in Nashville is quickly coming to a close.  Our season here is ending, for lots of reasons, that all add up to the fact that sometimes, you just know, kind of like you know when spring is coming and winter is ending, there are signs, clues, hints, of the change in seasons.  We have been experiencing these signs, clues, hints, in our own lives and they all are pointing us at moving forward, back to Fort Wayne.  We knew we would only be here for a season, and we didn’t know how long it would last.  I must admit, I had hoped it would last longer, but when seasons change, you can’t really stop it, you can only embrace it, and celebrate the season you have just come through. 

Up until this point, this blog has been a collection of stories, quotes, quips that communicate the change in perspective I have gone through.  Change is hard.  Hence the title, “Winter in Nashville.”  It’s very easy to generalize about people when you live in isolation from the rest of the world.  So much of our time here has been about leaving that isolation.  Through this process, I have been able to meet and have relationships with some very amazing people, people who have taught me the fallacy of those generalizations, and that in the end, the one truth I can hang on to is that love always wins.      

As this season ends, I find myself being very reflective, and sentimental.  We put our house on the market last week, symbolizing the beginning of the goodbye.  The remaining entries in this blog will be dedicated to that goodbye, to the people and places who have made this three year expereince one that I will never forget. 

So here’s to all of you, and thanks for helping me through Winter in Nashville. 

Choosing to believe something different has been my little catchphrase for this blog.  It represents the journey that I am on, to take a closer look at the things that I believe and ask why I believe them, to investigate further the values and “truths” of conservative white middle class culture.  These are values and truths that my culture has passed on to me and until the last three years, I have generally accepted without much thought.

One of the topics I have been thinking alot about, and have commented on before, (White Middle Class) is race. 

In the last few days, my friend Ariah has started a conversation about Hip Hop on his Blog, I’ve been reading a book called “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.  The History of the Hip Hop Generation“, we watched a movie about Ruby Bridges, and I took a final for my Sociology class, where I had to comment on racism in America.  It all collided together to create this “grand revelation.”  One that I’d like to share.  

Recently, a friend and I were engaged in a conversation regarding the “blacks� that he supervised at his job.  He made a blanket statement that most of them were lazy but couldn’t be fired because of anti-

discrimination laws.  I consider my friend to be intelligent, so I was very surprised by this comment.  The next half hour felt like an episode of “All in the Familyâ€? with me playing the son-in-law and my friend starring as Archie Bunker.  I refer to this conversation as a reference point for my ”revelation.”   

It’s only been forty years, one generation, since it was legal, and preferred, to discriminate against minorities, mainly blacks.  The law of the land holds great power with many of our nation’s citizens, so much power, that we can allow it to do the thinking for us about what is right and what is wrong.  It’s only been forty years since not hiring a black person simply because of their skin was legal, and encouraged.  It’s only been forty years since a black person could be denied admissions to college, or sold a house, or kept out of a restaurant or a store, simply because they were black.  A great injustice has been done in that the law said discrimination and racism were okay.  This planted in our psyche that what was being done was right and too few people chose to think for themselves and say and act otherwise.  Unfortunately, it is very hard to erase something that has been planted in the psyche of the masses.  It takes a desire, and then great effort.  This is something that my friend has not taken the energy to do.  I finished the conversation by asking him what if African-American’s (a term that irritates him) would have arrived on the American scene in a different way.  I then pointed out to him that his perspective is being shaped by the ideas of a few egomaniacal rich white men who a few hundred years ago, stole humans from their homes and forced them to work for nothing.  We are shaped, often unknowingly, by the ideas of the past.  When will we choose to believe something different?