My prayer and fasting today came in an unexpected manner. I reserved a spot for a songwriting workshop at a Vineyard church in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. They had had a couple such workshops at my church in Evanston but I was unavailable for either of them. (I think I also found out about them last minute.) I had signed up for it, 1.) because I've never done a "songwriting" workshop in my life, 2.) because I thought it would be fun, and 3.) in the midst of a lot of big-life transitions I anticipate coming up -- and the appropriate reflections -- this would've been a good opportunity to try and connect differently with music that would also be an attempt on my part to give the glory back to God in my music. A song that has been kind of front-and-center for me is the song "Heart of Worship" by Matt Redman. Below is a sample of the lyrics:
I'll bring You more than a song
For a song itself is not what You have required
You search much deeper within, through the way things appear
You're looking into my heart
I'm coming back to the heart of worship
And it's all about You, it's all about You, Jesus
I'm sorry, Lord, for the thing I've made,
When it's all about You, it's all about You, Jesus
[By the way, Hope for Artists is having its Worship and Creativity night this Monday, June 17th at the Evanston Vineyard Church. We'll be doing this song, among others. We would love for you to come!]
The short answer to why this song has been huge is that, over the last 6-7 years, I've been trying to do music full-time, both creatively and career-path-wise. It has been a lot of fun in a lot of ways. But in looking back, I've been beginning to see how I started idolizing music and wanting the glory of the music-making and music-performing process for myself. And there are a number of ways I'm seeing that this might have materialized. As such, it is clear that the glory, even in the joy of making and performing certain pieces (and even in seeing my piano students succeed and have musical breakthroughs), that all needs to go back to God.
In the end, it was really why I signed up for the workshop. It was connected with a Vineyard church, and I saw it as an opportunity to both try something different from what I've been doing, as well as find a space to practice connecting with God in my music-making (which I rarely have been doing), and to practice putting Him first in the process.
Instead, I ended up not going. To be sure, I made it all the way to downtown Chicago before I pulled the plug. In the end, I had left my home about 5 minutes later than what my phone projection said I should've left (whoops). My prayers and declarations of favor on the route that my map app had determined the fastest (for all traffic lights to be green, for all vehicles and other roadblocks to be removed, and for the lost time to be redeemed) turned out to be the opposite: more red lights, more traffic, and my phone's projection of my ETA moved from maybe 5 minutes late, to 20 minutes late, to 35-40 minutes late. It was clear by the time I was halfway down there that there was spiritual warfare. It was like the enemy of my soul didn't want me to go, and he successfully made it impossible.
So I let it go. I circled back and took the very slow, very scenic route home. I decided to try to have my own private composing workshop in a Starbucks about 3-4 miles northwest of downtown Chicago. Instead, I journaled and doodled on a page of music paper for about an hour and a half. There was jazz playing on in the background. I couldn't focus. It didn't matter much; I had pulled out a bunch of Biblical texts I had printed out and stuck in one of my composition folders, looked through them, and wasn't at all inspired.
In the end, as I reflect on choosing not to go to today's songwriting workshop, the question finally really came to me: "do I really want to collaborate?" In the Classical world, composers rarely collaborate, perhaps only with those that will help them orchestrate their music. In the jazz/rock/blues/pop world, rarely is it really one person that writes a whole song. Or so it seems. It seems that there is this expectation of collaboration, that one person will write one part of a song, and another will write another, and so on, and that the process will also include one person possibly changing another person's musical ideas to suit a different part of the song that was written by a different person. And the truth is, I'm not sure I really like "collaborating" like that.
There's more to reflect, to be sure. More to process, more to ponder, more to think through and to pray through. I know that a big part of my musical fatigue is that I do earnestly miss it when it was just me and God.
A few God-winks on the day:
1.) A sense of peace when I emailed the songwriting group to tell them I wasn't coming.
2.) Rain. (My girlfriend and her family love rain)
3.) The spot where I pulled over while driving home (I had remembered I needed to text my girlfriend) was at the intersection of Lincoln Avenue and Mozart Street.
4.) A bumper sticker that said "Don't Box God In."