A song, a poem or just a collection of words?

 

So Friday at work my mind was wondering as usual. I’m pretty sure I can do 90% of my job in my sleep, so sometimes I think I do. Anyway, this line came to me “The pursuit of stuff at the cost of the soul” & I thought, hey that would be a good line for a song, or at least a concept for a song (the trap of materialism in the modern world). It probably needs a better word than stuff, but that is how it came out & I have not played with a thesaurus yet.

So I emailed the line to myself so that whenever I next got around to trying writing a song I could use it. A few minutes later I realized that the words were ready & I better let them out if I didn’t want to lose them.

 

It is obviously deeply affected by the DFW speech I referenced yesterday. Also you can see the problem I currently have with song writing. I start to write & then all this stuff just flows out. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but in order to turn it into a song I need to spend some time with it to shape it, form it & structure it. Anyway, here it is, uncut and unedited. Right now I’m not sure if it’s a song a poem or just a collection of words, if I ever get around to figuring it out I’ll let you know.

 

(Caught up in) The pursuit of stuff at the cost of the soul

 

Trapped by fear we lose our way

Wrapped with pain we learn to fear

Fear to think

Fear to feel

Fear of the truth

Who even knows what truth is anymore

We fear what we might find if we look at these things

 

So we cast aside the truth

The pursuit of life

The desires for all that is good

 

We replace it with the pursuit of stuff

We want things for things sake

We want jobs

We want cars

We want homes

We want recognition for what someone else thinks is valuable

We want things, many times good things, but for the wrong reasons

 

 

In all this, we forget to find out who we are

We don’t think for ourselves

We did it once, as a child you have no choice but to explore & investigate what is real

As you grow old invariably to some degree we lose our innocence

The quest for what is true & good

It is hard, it hurts

Yet over time the lack of the quest kills us, it destroys our soul

We become the walking dead

Cubicle zombies surviving drudgery

The glass is always half empty

 

The default programming becomes that of a class 1 A-hole

Why, because we don’t want to feel & we don’t want to be seen for what we really are

If you become good enough at it you even learn to enjoy being the a-hole

But that is not who you really are.

Shine a light on your soul, see what is hidden in there, shriveled & small

Yet never beyond recovery

 

Once you shine a light on the soul it will catch light

One a soul is lit, even dimly it can never be in the dark again

Feed it, think with it, feel with it

The light will grow stronger

The light will become blinding

The light will be so hot that it will light the souls of others

 

Then & only then arte you truly living

To light the soul of another who is suffering in zombiehood just as you once were

I shine my light for the glory of Jesus

It matters not though why you shine you light

Only that you let it shine

You can shine for Jesus, for Allah for the sake of living an existence that is simply not pointless

But shine on my friends, for life to have true meaning you simply must shine.