I have been busy lately. Too busy really.  I am not really built for speed and noise and juggling many things at once.  I have never been good at it.  When too many things are happening at once I often frustrate easy and snap often…..I am a bit of a grump when things overwhelm me.   I had not spent much time with the kids lately so my wife and I took them to Armstrong woods.  Surrounded by enormous redwoods we tromped down the path.  Me in the lead, “come on guys!  Let’s keep moving” I called out to my wife and kids as they tottled off the path to look at moss or a rock or the way a leaf had grown out from a stump.  Every once in a while my two year old would call out to me to “wait for me!” and when I did he would hold my hand and walk me towards some other wonder just off the path.  But me, I had no patience for these detours.  I wanted to get to where we were going.  I wanted to get out my frantic energy with an exhausting hike.   I wanted to reach the top.   I wanted to see as much as possible in the time we had.  I felt a bit like a top that had been winded up but not released.  So off we went down the path me pushing ever forward my kids constantly bringing me back and my frustration building.  My son’s yelled for me to stop so I reluctantly, once again, walked back to find them both crouching by the path staring intently at a multicolored centipede.  “Isn’t it beautiful Dad?” was the question my sons asked me.  I stood for a moment watching my sons so enveloped in the moment…..not pushing…..not pulling….just being and I felt very foolish for all of my haste to get up the path.  My son Easton said, “will you walk with us Dad?”  My eyes weld up,  “of course.”  I put Easton on my shoulders and Wilder asked to hold my hand and off we went.  Suddenly I was moving at the speed of life.  Now, I felt the breeze that was always there.  I noticed the complete and utter beauty of these trees that had been here for 100′s of years watching us come and go, live and die, and foolishly run up and down the paths as they stood silent.  Now we stopped everywhere to look at leaves, the way dust had settled on a fern, the rings of a fallen tree….all was a tiny miracle….all was beautiful…and I felt the unwinding begin.  What had I been teaching my sons: RUN, Run RUN….keep moving…get to the top…keep your eyes on the destination….focus on moving towards the goal and all the while ignoring the path.  All the while ignoring where you are.  I may have been teaching them this in a way with my actions but thankfully they are too young to notice, too close to God to pay attention to this foolishness.  Instead with tiny hands they lead me back, back to the present. 

We turned a corner along the path and the boys asked if they could get out pencil and paper and draw what they had seen for awhile as we sat underneath a redwood.  I stood silently staring up at the trees watching them sway in the summer breeze.  I must of stood there for 15 minutes in the silence until I heard another family tromping up the path.  A mother and father leading their son up the path.  The mother pulling her 3 year old along saying, “we will have plenty of time to stop and look around once we get to the top, OK?  There are plenty of things to look at up there.”  The boy holding his mother’s hand moves into a trot to keep up.  “But…but…I want…I want to see that” he cries out.  There is so much to see in this world, so much, and it is not all at the end. The boy understands It is all not waiting for us once we meet our goal.  It is actually here right now and we notice when we start thinking small instead of big, slow instead of fast, quiet instead of noise, stillness instead of busyness. 

How many times must I/we LEARN this lesson?  I get the sense this will be a lesson I will learn daily, hourly and minute by minute because as many times as I suddenly “get it” I get distracted just as quickly.  The boy passes my sons sitting under the redwood tree and asks if he can stop but the mom and dad do not answer.  He walks towards me and I give him the biggest smile I can.  He smiles back just as big.  His parents lead him down the path and I watch him as he continues to reach for small things.

life, peace, spirituality, trent yaconelli | 3 Comments »

I have been going through my notebook after traveling so much lately with the band.  I realize I have alot of material that I have fogotton about.  Here are some notes as we were driving through Montana.

There are two ways of looking at spirituality.  One is to memorize a code of conduct of do’s and don’ts and to take every word of the bible literally….only at surface value….and then live by this.  Always keeping the code in front of you to reference.  The other is to take the words and swallow them whole to let them dissolve in your blood, your skin, your eyes and hair and feet.  To let them burn as fuel to the fire already present inside.  Now, instead of in FRONT of your eyes they are your eyes and now everything you do, see, encounter is spiritual – is God – is practice. 

Picture by tommy martin

spirituality | 2 Comments »

Faith and doubt: it seems we are at a constant tennis match in our heads between faith and doubt. There are moments that we stand strong with our feet firmly planted and have great faith in life, God, our choices, beauty, truth….other times we crumble at the mere hint of a storm cloud on the horizon and believe every decision we have made is wrong and if there is God our life is for his amusement. But maybe this is how it is supposed to be? Maybe our constant battle between faith and doubt is a gift. For when we stand strong we can often forget to look around and check our bearings, check in with our marriage, our kids, our spiritual path and just like a ship a half a degree off course 150 miles in we are oceans away from where we thought. So we should welcome doubt as it comes. We should question and dive into the depths of darkness and allow ourselves to think, “maybe I was wrong about everything.” Only then will we truly discover what we were right about. I think God knows that we get complacent when we KNOW all the answers and have an unyielding faith. Yes, doubt is hard and ugly and difficult but it leads us to a stronger faith – in God, our life, our choices, our path. There are those that only seem to have faith and faith and more faith and they are sure of absolutely everything. These are the people who get caught in affairs, in prostitution rings, embezzling, lying, stealing whatever because they gave themselves no room to question inward or out loud. They left themselves no room to dive into their doubts and let them teach them. So let us let the match begin and bob our heads back and forth with each hit between faith and doubt because in the end each has something to teach us.

christianity, faith, life, spirituality | 3 Comments »

I wonder if our struggle is irrelevant in a way.  It is relevant in the fact that in the struggle we learn, we unfold, and we become more and more ourselves but it is irrelevant that our path can cause us pain and difficulty.   I was listening to a great singer songwriter named Sam Baker talking about a song he wrote about watching a family die in front of his eyes.  He was in a train and someone had put a bomb in it.  A family of three was killed and his own body was ripped apart.  His hands, voice, ears all severely damaged.   He wrote a wonderful song called Broken Fingers about it and the interviewer was asking him about how difficult it must be to sing the song.  He replied that his struggle and difficulty singing it was irrelevant.  It was his job to tell the story, it was his job to write songs no matter how painful they might be to him.  As I struggle on my own path and I am sure as you struggle on yours I often feel like, “this is too hard, too painful, too much” but this man’s words reminded me that it is actually irrelevant in a way.  The point is to find your gifts….your God given gifts….and to pursue them no matter what.  Yes, it may be painful, hard, financially ridiculous, difficult but we must keep on the path.   We all have a job to do – path to follow while we are here and lessons to learn.   If we are story tellers or painters or social workers or parents we must struggle and push on.  The difficulty is part of the journey.  Nobody said it would be easy, nobody said life is about roses and soft pillows.  Our life is one big story – one big song and we have to sing it, live it because it is our job to live it no matter where it takes us with arms open. 

We were in Yreka, CA last weekend playing a summer concert and as we were playing the song Just Say Anything I was feeling very centered, very in the moment.  As we reached the end of the song and it began to build I looked down to see a girl with downs-syndrome who had been dancing the whole time standing at the front of the stage with her arms wide open singing as loud as she could with head tilted back and eyes to the sky.  She has struggles and problems I cannot imagine but there she was arms wide open and with strained voice singing out loud.   May we all learn from that one beautiful moment.

If you get a chance check out Sam Baker at www.sambakermusic.com His album Mercy and Pretty World are wonderful.  He ends each album with a song that has the line “everyone is at the mercy of another one’s dreams.”  Which is a post unto itself.  I posted both songs here.

Broken Fingers off of the album Pretty World

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Mercy off of the album Mercy

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Uncategorized, life, music, prayer, religion, spirituality, trent yaconelli, vocation | 3 Comments »