raw

I have a Youtube channel or account or whatever people refer to them as: http://www.youtube.com/spidersoma. My reason for starting one was to upload a friend's song that she wrote and performed for our old college. Months later, I recorded a song and someone asked me to upload it somewhere. Youtube seemed as good a place as any, so there it went. Somehow I ended up with 76 "videos" (I use that word loosely since I just post songs with a photo) with more to come, I am sure. 

At any rate, today I was on an online forum and some people were discussing a cover I had posted on my Youtube channel. One individual commented that they liked how I showcased the simplicity of the song in an elegant way. 

I was happy for their comments and told them they hit the proverbial nail on the head of what I was trying to accomplish in my reply: "My whole 'shtick' as it stands is to tear songs down to their very basic and simple acoustic core. I guess this is a way of showing people that even the most complicated or produced songs come from a very vulnerable, simple, yet genuine and raw place."

I looked over the words I had said, at first out of self-conscious vulnerability as I had kind of made my intentions transparent and wanted to make sure I had described myself in a soft yet honest light. But something else resonated with me: this is humanity. I'm no stranger to the fact that songs are an extension of who people are and what they want to express from inside themselves (well, at least those who aren't polluting the creative pool with songs meant for profit), so I started to digress and reflect.

Beyond our basic intrinsic need as humans (shelter, food, water, air, sex), we have emotional needs as well: safety, companionship, security: in ourselves, our relationships, maybe even our finances. There was a time when I had built up a cloud around me that was meant to magnetize people, give them a reason to come check out what the commotion was all about and then keep them in said cloud. I couldn't even begin to recall and list all the things that I thought mattered to others and, therefore, caused me to proclaim or advertise them, but it was all purposeful: I needed people.

At the core of me was a raw and insatiable desire to have immeasurable loyalty, trust, love, and companionship from others. I fed off of time spent with others and I counted it lonely times when I was by myself. I kept neglecting the Word and the Truth that I had access to all these things, 24/7, completely devoid of expectation or condition. I had the greatest loyalty, trust, love, and companionship of all in the form of my Savior, my God. It is amazing how a cognizance of this then allowed me to stop trying to garner the glory for myself and start giving glory where it was due, and to point others to the purest and most undefiled source of fulfillment.

We produce our own lives, we master our agendas (in a calendar sense, not a motive sense), our job titles, our educational endeavors, our friends, our mentors, our community involvement, our mission statement, and our public persona through social networking. We can appear to be very complicated and important people to others, but only one truth should ever matter and be prevalent in our lives: at the core of who we are is a need for a Savior, and our only interest at the end of the day should be to share that truth with others. The raw love of Jesus can strip away our self-induced layers of protection from feeling hurt or insignificance and cause us to be accessible both to His love, and our usefulness as a compass towards Him. 

I oftentimes imagine a world in which He is the true center of our world (that is the faces, places, and spaces we interact with in body, mind, soul, and spirit), and every heart, every eye, every mind is pointed at Him. There will be no questions of how to live when we're all facing the same direction, when we are all living in a raw and genuine place of divine fulfillment.