YONDER BREAKS

I've been playing music publicly more lately, thanks to my good friends Chris Baur and Roger Mindwater (we used to play in a band together called Campfield). A few weeks ago Chris let me play some songs at his show and, right in the middle, the waiter came up to ask us to turn it down. Ugh, not what you want to hear when you're putting yourself out there in a song you wrote. So we turned down the guitar, I backed away from the mic and we pressed on. But hearing that question does something to you as a musician that I want to write about... It's certainly not the first time this has happened to me (unfortunately). The first was playing with my buddy Mike in our pseudo-metal/folk rock two-piece, Thrash Choir . Again, Chris was giving us a shot and we were playing a little impromptu four-song set at an outdoor patio on James Island that has since shut down. Some diners were sitting a little too close to our amps and asked us to turn it down. I even had the same thing happ...

Do you ever have trouble loving others? We're commanded to love everyone, but there is always some difficult person out there that you know you're supposed to treat nicely and what not; but when it comes down to it, you kind of wish that he or she would just get out of town and move away. A new command  I give you: Love one another.  As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35) Of course we're supposed to ask God for help in these instances, but often were are given the help in God's word before we ask it -- we just have to look. Check out this verse below: This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son  into the world that we might live through him.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us  and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Dear friends,  since God so loved us,  we als...

Back in 2012/2013 I had a pretty long commute to and from work. About this time, I discovered the voice recorder app on my phone (I'm not sure why it took this long...) and decided to use the massive amount of time I was spending in my car productively. I did this through writing songs, dreaming up verses and choruses and then recording them, piece by piece, on my phone. Well, by the time 2014 rolled around and I quit my day job to become a stay-at-home dad, I had quite a few tunes recorded. And don't think that just because I dropped a daily commute that I stopped writing on the road...no, no. This trend has continued to this day. The whole thing got me thinking that it would be fun to make videos and an album of all the songs I have written in cars, recording those very songs inside cars. It took a couple years to get started, but here is the first one: Bleed These Dreams . I wrote this song while driving home from a visit to the main office of the property management com...

I wrote some years ago on the topic of age and expectations . It's an idea that has been coming up again recently, so I thought maybe it would be a good thing to revisit. I keep hearing, "I'm so-and-so age and I haven't done so-and-so," typically centered around the milestone of turning thirty. I can't say I'm not immune to this thinking though, as life certainly hasn't turned out the way I planned ten years ago. My career is pretty much non-existent. Actually, the whole idea of having a career has been slowly flying out the window before me. I think this is something God has been bringing me through personally, so I don't want to make any comment on careers here; but really just dealing with this idea of believing I would have hit a certain milestone by this point in life is tough. My struggle is career, for others it's relationship status or having kids... Actually, I can't really think of any other milestones that come up in convers...

Let's talk about boldness. I haven't been much for boldness, evidenced by my dating track-record. First was the girl I never called because I was afraid my parents would find out I had a girlfriend (they didn't care). Then there was the one who I was not bold enough to ask out, but rather told a friend who knew her to spread the word that I had a thing for her. She came up to me at lunch one day, and the rest is history. That is, until I got tired of her and, not being bold enough to actually break up with her, was just mean to her until she brought up the subject. My lack of boldness continued through college until I met my wife, where I was still not so bold as to ask her out, but kept hinting at it until we decided to have the DTR (define-the-relationship). Things worked out with her, but I still have a ways to go... In scripture though, it seems that God rewards boldness. Jesus said in Matthew 11:12 , "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kin...