So I'm sitting here. And at the moment, I'm searching for something. A sound. The problem is, I don't know what it sounds like, or how it flows. I don't know what it speaks of or what it means.
This sound is my song voice.
You see, I have written lyrics in the past (some of which are on this blog, in fact), and I've always written them with a little voice in my head singing them out, vocalizing the words into a sound that has structure. But the problem is, it isn't my voice. It's the voice of whatever singer I was just listening to a moment ago. And that's wrong, because that doesn't make me a song writer. It makes me an actor, an imitator. And if that's what I was looking for, then it would be alright.
I believe that every one of us has within the potential to be utterly unique and extraordinary, to say something or be something that the world has not seen before. The trouble is that so many of us fall into imitation instead. It makes perfect sense, really; from birth, we learn how to walk, how to talk, how to act and not to act, how to think and not to think, from the people around us. It would be very hard for us to do otherwise. But this makes it hard to find out what that unique person inside of us is truly like, because they're hidden under layers of mish-mashed personalities that we saw, liked, and added to our persona.
Starting from scratch isn't easy, whether it's in singing, in writing, in thinking, in creativity, in intuition, or in our spiritual journey. And I don't mean to say that we leave everything behind, because there are great lessons that all of us have already learned from our past. But when we see those events as defining us, it is then that we incarcerate the person that we truly are. Bad things happen, and so we adapt to try and keep it from happening next time. Good things happen, and we change to make sure they happen more often. And yet we're still miserable.
Maybe this is because we don't have an idea of what we're trying to be. As Christians, arguably, we do: we ultimately try to become more like Christ. But what does that mean? Look at what Jesus did. He hung out with normal, nonreligious people; he did things and said things that no one else would have thought to do or dared to do. Why?
Because he was completely himself, and no one else.
Is that why we do what we do? So that we can become like the people that we imitate, people that seem happy or successful? Well, of course we do. I suppose that's obvious. But maybe this also reveals the source of our pain when it doesn't work. We can dress like someone else, act like someone else, even think like someone else, but none of us are happy. And so, everyone is still trying to find that "perfect image" to follow. Have we never considered that maybe what becoming Christ-like means is not to all become uniform copies of a man who walked this earth, but to each become a unique, beautiful facet of an infinite God, whom Jesus is a part of? God himself is Three, and yet he is also One. And so we must be: each entirely different, each entirely a reflection of God's character, yet when combined, all forming a single Body.
Didn't Paul say that each of us had a different role to play? Why are we all trying to reach the same goal? Why aren't we instead seeking what our completely unique role is, instead of copying somebody who looks like they're happy? Jesus never told his disciples to all become walking Bibles. He told them to spread his message, yes. And we are called to be like Christ, yes. But when we are talking about a man who was God, a man who was also infinite, what does that mean? I believe that it means something different for each of us.
What's my singing voice?
What's your singing voice?
That's between you and God.
No comments:
Post a Comment