How One Sentence Destroyed my Self-Worth.

I was sitting at the kitchen counter silently eating my lunch with the little boy I nanny when I had an important realization. It smacked so hard in the face that you would think I was a college girl who just found out that iPhone 6s were being handed out for free with pumpkin spiced lattes at the local Starbucks.

I had been innocently listening to my Pandora station of Jesus jams when, without warning, I was sucked into an intense worship session. I wasn't raising my hands, swaying back and forth, or even singing aloud at all for that matter--I was watching a three year old smear peanut butter all over his face and in his hair. Yet without a doubt, it was the best worship to God I have experienced in quite a while. As a professional musician, I often have a hard time worshipping, too often distracted by thinking about the music itself... which adds to the irony that I was able to zone out entirely and worship in a way that I hadn't in a long time over PB&Js with a three year old.

See, I have been having a silent (and seemingly weird) struggle lately. I am in the sweetest season of my life that I have ever reached, as shown below:

• I am saved by Jesus Christ and will live eternally in Heaven.
• I have a really, REALLY awesome husband and we enjoy an enriching and satisfying marriage. 
• I have not one, but two jobs that I enjoy and make me feel respected, needed, and that I am using my talents for good. 
• Carter and I like where we live and we get to spend a lot of time together
• I have this crazy thing called FREE TIME, which has been a foreign idea for the last six years. (Note, six years ago is when I had the immense need to grow up very quickly.) I even have  a social life these days.

So WHY have I been struggling lately with doubt, dissatisfaction, self-hatred, and fear? WHY all of this, when my life is indisputably better than it ever has before? Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about my life at all--I don't have anything missing. Yet these negative feelings have been tearing me apart from the inside out. Why?

The simple answer is because I am a sinner who will always sin and this manifests all over my life in ugly ways. But... I think the honest answer goes a deeper than that. 

Going through life in suburban, middle-class, "always-happy" midwest USA leads to a lot of people consistently smiling at you and asking questions like, "how are you?" and, "what's new in your life?" These questions are generally asked with good intentions, but without any interest in an answer longer than one sentence. So, without realizing it, I had been placing the precarious weight of my self-worth on this itty bitty one sentence response that I--like everyone else--delivered countless times in an off-hand manner without much reflection. I needed an interesting and important answer, one that would make people mark "noteworthy person" in their mental address book. 

And in the last six years, I always had one. 

"My mom is in the hospital."

"Going to college! Yowza!"

"I am taking 21 credits and working part time and have an internship, so I am basically on the edge of implosion at any second."

"I got dumped and am now all about exerting a lot of effort into hating him/getting other people to hate him and love me instead so that I can feel validated."

"I just went through six months of complete renewal of my faith, self-empowerment, and have basically become an entirely different person."

"I got engaged!"

"I AM GETTING MARRIED IN ______ DAYS!!!!!"

"I am a newlywed and I NEED to tell you why it's the best thing that could literally EVER happen to anyone who has ever lived. Ever. Literally."

"I'm writing my thesis and would honestly rather choose death."

"I graduated!"

"I have a cool new job!"

But lately, these exciting answers have come to a screeching halt and all I really have to talk about is crockpot recipes, home improvement, going to the library, and other equally dull and totally lame topics. This lack of a shiny, exciting sentence was making me feel like I was no longer important to people and, therefore, less valuable as a person.

My life coming to a sweet plateau should have made me turn my eyes to heaven with gratitude, but instead I started casting around for new things to fill the space. My "sentence struggle" merely represented the more troublesome reality that I was refusing to allow God to be enough, for His mercy and grace to be my identity. Instead of showing others I was humbled by God blessing me with peace and stillness, I was choosing to be bitter and hardened. I was acting as though life had stolen something from me instead of realizing the reality--that everything I have was given to me by God. 

So while I was eating my lunch with my three year old buddy, a song by All Sons & Daughters--one that I know quite well--sang the line, "The heartbeat of my life is to worship in your light." It is a line I have pondered many times and have tried to write across my life. 

Was worshipping God the most important thing to me--my very heartbeat? Was it showing in my actions and my words... in my sentence? It wasn't, and that was the root of all my heartache and dissatisfaction. 

Sitting there enjoying our PB&Js, I instantaneously realized all of this upon hearing that All Sons & Daughters line. I suddenly started smiling insanely--enough that Colton looked at me in his sweet three year old way and asked, "What is happy?" I just laughed and responded, "everything, buddy. Just everything."

And it truly was. 

Why Richard Strauss Made Me Question Humanity Today.

This morning's Music and Politics class was a lot to process. We began talking about Richard Strauss and his unfortunate circumstance of being a composer with Jewish family whose music Hitler happened to be fond of. It deeply surprised me that Hitler was fond of such a shocking and polarizing opera like Strauss' Solome, which features adultery, incest, nudity of minors, and the kissing/serenading of the decapitated head of John the Baptist. We discussed his precarious position and whether or not his involvement with the Nazis was more of selfish desires or survival instinct. The discussion was prompted by our responses to "Death Fugue," a chapter of music critic Alex Ross' provocative book, "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century." The chapter reflects on whether or not there is a truly 'Nazi sound' in the music of early 20th century Germany.

The conversation, though, turned to music in concentration camps. This rapidly spiraled down an upsetting path that lead to harrowing stories of unimaginable cruelty. One story in particular took place in a concentration camp where the marginalized were in an exercise yard, listening to their fellow jews play in a string quartet when one woman stumbled. A guard immediately released one of his dogs to set upon the woman and tear her to shreds. "If you were the second violinist in the string quartet, what would you do?" asked Dr. Saylor. "Keep playing," responded one of my classmates, who just so happens to be Jewish.

Saylor then eloquently poised that this, this surely is true evil. Being forced to watch something so horrific and have no choice but to watch and keep playing, something that seems impossibly trivial... this is what destroys a soul. This is evil. I was left feeling entirely unfulfilled when he didn't go on to share the gospel of Jesus Christ, but that's just me.

"What is your response hearing this?" Saylor prompted. The class was silent. We looked at our books, fidgeted with pens, pulled on our scarves. I wondered if the girl next to me was crying or sniffling from the cold. What a profoundly impossible question.

My response was wanting to cry, laugh, tear my clothes, run from the room, and change the world all at once. I wanted to proclaim "Praise the good and merciful Lord that this world is not my home! I do not belong to this gruesomeness, to my own sinful nature, to the corruption of this world!" I didn't, though, and the moment passed. I put my head down on the table.

Someone else responded and said, "It seems like I am just hearing a story. Like this is a fairy tale and could never be true."

"It makes me realize that there is no way the Nazis viewed them as human beings. It is impossible to do this when you know that they are people."

Yet another said, "It makes it feel like less of a story when I realize that this was less than 100 years ago. Humanity has existed for a few thousand years, and this was less than 100 years ago."

In response, someone said "It doesn't seem real because of how far the world has come. Think about how different we are than just seven years ago." I watched Dr. Saylor's face twitch. He then brought up the United States' Japanese concentration camps, Stalin's liquidation of Jews, genocide in Rwanda, and the recent genocides in Bosnia that happened in our lifetime. (Side note, my best friend growing up was a first generation immigrant Bosnian that fled to the US when she was 5.) I nodded sadly.

I left class today feeling a dense weight in my chest. I didn't want to look anyone in the eye as I walked away, yet wanted equally to talk to everyone; for us to go somewhere and have a debrief and watch a funny movie and hug each other. Instead of any of that, I decided to create.

When something happens that I cannot process, I have to write, paint, sing, make, touch, do anything with my hands that may produce something that did not exist before. I wrote, and wrote, and prayed, and pondered. At the end of it all, I came to this:

I want to raise children who are respectful, kind, curious, and good. I want to make other people happy for the rest of my days. I want to never give up on searching for the beauty in all things, and creating my own in every little way I can. I will serve my God for the rest of my days. Anything else is outside of my control.

I may mourn the lives lost in the Holocaust, but cannot change them. I can pull my hair at the nature of the human condition and weep for society. But I cannot change it. Instead, I can love every corner of the world that my little self comes in contact with and sleep well at night knowing that the creator I serve has ransomed me by name, and that His plans are beyond understanding.





(To Dr. Saylor when you read this, sorry about all the feelings.)