I’m supposed to like record players; I know this.

I’m supposed to like them because I’m a musician, and somehow I’m still slightly cool (at least, my 18-year old daughter still tells me that).

So just those two things alone are supposed to add up to me liking (and collecting) vinyl.

Oh, and then add into the fact that I’m white, and (somehow) middle-class.

This is a slam-dunk, people.

But here’s the deal:

I really don’t.

And it’s not like I haven’t tried: Just like I was supposed to, I retrieved my old records from my parents’ house years ago, in preparation for when I’d get my own turn table and begin to revel once again in that warm analog sound.

I prepared for this!

Then a year or two ago, I even talked my parents (in Virginia) out of their turntable, which was/is a decent Yamaha model from the 80s. When I got it home to Florida, it didn’t work right, but I figured, “Hey, I’ve got time to get this thing repaired, and then I’m gonna be just as cool as all of my hipster friends!”

Then my family got me both a new turntable and a vinyl copy of Funeral by Arcade Fire.

Folks, it doesn’t get any more hip than that.

So I played the Arcade Fire (starting with, what else, “Wake Up”), and then started to cycle through my old records, and in about 5 minutes I remembered something about vinyl that I’d long since forgot:

Vinyl scratches really easily.

I remember being 13 or 14 and sitting down to listen to my favorite “LP” or “45” and being shocked and devastated when a skip or a scratch appeared. I remember delicately handling the records only to have mysterious clicks and skips appear no matter what I did.

My memory wasn’t that rosy.

What’s more, I discovered that I really enjoyed having my entire catalog of music available on my iPhone, my desktop, my laptop, my iPad (as long as there is WIFI, of course), and my AppleTV.

It like the convenience.

And as far as the tone goes, I get that I am losing sound in the compression (as good as it gets), and let’s face it analog warmth does trump (ugh) digital clarity sometimes.

But here’s the thing: 1) To a certain degree, I can EQ for warmth. I roll off some highs, and bring up some some low-midrange, and revel in the color of a nice low end. Also, 2) being a musician, I already hear a lot of what many people miss. I don’t have “Golden Ears”; they’ve never made hit records, but I’m aware of the fact that I’m probably hearing probably 20% more of what the average listener hears, even with the data loss.

Okay. So what’s the point?

The point is, I know all of these things. I love the fact that my family bought me a turntable, but for now in my life, I will focus on digital music, if for no other reason than I don’t need any more stuff in my house. I already have an acquisition problem, and I am practically ashamed of how much I have. Some of this I can justify as “ministry tools” (guitars and books), but other things… like records. I just can’t, at least for now.

But then we went to St. Petersburg for vacation. As we were walking up and down the cool downtown streets, my daughter saw a record store that she wanted to go in, and so we all followed her.

I have to admit: it was very nostalgic to walk around the aisles filled with all of those discs. It felt like 1982 all over again.

My wife casually said to me, “You know, you should buy a record. Don’t you like Wilco? It can be your souvenir.”

She said this to me with all innocence.

But the most amazing thing happened to me when she said it…

Despite the fact that I have no room for vinyl in my house…

… Despite the fact that I know that I prefer to listen to my stuff through iTunes or Spotify…

… Despite the fact that I am crystal clear on the fact that I did not want a record…

… Despite all of that I said, “Yeah… I love Summerteeth; I’ll get it.”

And so I did.

And then I felt awful.

You might say, “What’s the big deal, Eric? It’s just a record?!?!?”

But in my spirit, I was crushed.

Why couldn’t I say no?

How does one’s life get to the point where there is something inside you that drives you to just *acquire* things that you know you neither need nor want?

It was/is a sobering reminder: I am wired up for appetite; for desire; for selfish acquisition.

I desperately need someone or something to heal this sickness inside of me; I don’t want to be a person who mindlessly buys and consumes things simply because I can. Nonetheless, in this minute I utterly failed the test that life gave me.

So this day: this Holy Thursday. The day before Friday of the Cross, I am reminded that the “SELF” inside of me still has an agenda that is opposed to a life of simplicity. My self remains centered on ego and an agenda that would have me consumed with acquisition and consumerism, with control and domination of anything and anyone that gets in my way.

I’m thankful that the Cross not only broke the power of evil in the world, but decisively shows us all the way to exist in a way that transcends the world’s power.

It’s by dying that we truly live.

It’s not easy. I’ll always be drawn to “Glittering Images”, to the “impossible cool” of the world, but fortunately I’ll always have that stronger vision of the Christ on the Cross that reminds me that I don’t have to live like this anymore.

…..

Where has lent been taking you? Where has this journey led you?

I can become pretty fascinated with words and phrases. I find it interesting how we assume that some words mean one thing, when upon closer examination we discover that there is a nuance we are missing. Over time it is been forgotten, or changed by culture.

Eugene Peterson wrote once that in prayer we come to face to face with the possibility of words coming to mean what they really mean, which can be a pretty scary thing. But rather than focus on just that, I was thinking this morning about a phrase and a concept that is easily thrown around in circles of faith, but is seldom really thought about.

A journey inward is a journey into mystery. We discover things about ourselves that we never realized, we come face-to-face with aspects of our personality that we have either forgotten about or never discovered. As I’ve said before, to in this sense Lent is likewise a journey into this same mystery. Through our disciplines and abstinence and fasts, God reveals things about our lives and character that we were unaware of.

One of the phrases that Christians throw about quite easily is “God knows me better than I know myself.” The Bible reinforces this in writings like Psalm 139, when the writer writes that God has knit him together in his mother’s womb.

But the implications of this are fascinating to me: because it means that ultimately at the bottom of who we are we are a mystery, not just to other people, but to ourselves. We tend to assume that a contemplative, inward journey will lead us to a more concrete awareness of who we are, but oftentimes the opposite is true: as we go into ourselves more and more what we come to discover is that there is less and less about ourselves to understand. We realize that we are deeper than our possessions, deeper than our circumstances, deeper even then our emotions. Likewise, we come to see that our motives confuse us; we believe certain things with our minds, but actually behave in ways contrary to those beliefs. Ultimately it’s as if we are unknowable even to ourselves. It’s at this point, we are reminded that we are not called to trust ourselves for life or salvation; we are called to trust something—someone—else. At this point we can literally take ourselves out of the driver seat even have our own lives, and rest a shirt the one who ultimately knows us is guiding us.

If you know me at all, you know I’ve been periodically fascinated by the desert. I built a whole sermon series about it, have written about it here, and have read a myriad of books about “desert spirituality.” I’ve accepted it as a great teacher, and a challenging, but uncomfortable friend.

The idea of “desert spirituality” emerged in the first few hundred years of the church, as men and women fled the increasingly urban context of the faith and entered into the isolation and “fierce landscape” of the desert, usually in Egypt. While these pilgrims were definitely rejecting the culture that they saw around them, they were also seeking to more fully embrace the transformative and holy life that God was calling them to. In order to bring that life into being, they had to be brought face-to-face with the stark realities of who they were at their core, of who they were when the distractions ceased and they were unable to hide behind the countless masks that society so easily provided them with.

So, embracing a life that included vast amounts of time by themselves, as well as time with and serving others, they founded and developed a rigorous spirituality that is ruthlessly honest about what it means to be human (in all of our brokenness) as well as ruthlessly hopeful in a God that is lavishly loving and eternally committed to our growth and development.

The trouble is, most of us don’t live in deserts any more. We live in a comfortable, sustained and sustainable suburban existence.

Now we have to look for the desert, and it’s simply not easy to find.

The good news is that you don’t need to sand to have a true spiritual desert.

You just have be willing to experience discomfort, emptiness, longing, hunger, and some forms of deprivation and yearning.

Those things are discoverable if you really wish.

Lent is a “desert season” in the Christian calendar. The more we embrace the disciplines of abstinence that come with these 40 days, the  more we can taste the desert that brought such powerful revelation to the men and women that have gone before us.

Welcome this time as an opportunity to grow, to learn, to stretch, and to hear God in new (if challenging) ways.

There are just too many voices.

Coming from everywhere, and nowadays increasingly without ceasing or pause.

Red Dots—alerts on our phones—demand our attention, dings and whistles, buzzes and vibrations all pull us here and there, giving us the illusion of importance.

It’s a blissful distraction.

Some of us claim an allegiance to deeper waters. Some of us believe in a well of faith that dwells inside us.

But the voices and the dots, fortunately, give us a lovely, anesthesia.

But then, for better or for worse, occasionally we enter a season or a zone where the voices still and the silence grows, whether cultivated or not.

And in that silence, we hear another voice. The well of faith becomes clearer, and we can see a path towards the better, deeper, healthier parts of our souls.

Solitude may not be natural to our modern world, but it is far more necessary than we’d like to think, mostly because solitude carves out a dwelling space for the God that we seek and run after.

I’ve heard it said that God is a very powerful gentleman; he is the creator and mover of the universe, but at the same time he respects our desire for space, even when the space isolates ourselves from him.

Over time, however, some of us discover that it’s actually possible for solitude to become more natural to us than the red dots and the buzzing vibration.

If for no other reason than that’s where we find our Father.

We are not meant to be superhuman.

Last year, I managed to run my first race, EVER. I ran a 10k in March, and then, somehow, trained to run a half-marathon in October.

It was, by far, the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.

I was on a roll: my goal, my plan, my intention was to run the Tallahassee Half Marathon in February. In fact, I bought my registration and tweaked my training appropriately.

I had big plans.

But training over the holidays isn’t easy. I ate too much, skipped days here and there, and before you knew it I was a bit behind.

“No big,” I thought, “I just ran a half-marathon! I can make this up easily.”

One day in December I had an 8-mile run scheduled, and at about the 6 mile mark I felt a strange twinge in my ankle. It wasn’t enough to stop my run, but it was worth being aware of.

In the next day or two, I’d figured out that I had stumbled into another bout of tendonitis. It wasn’t painful to walk, but I definitely felt it when I tried to run.

(I had tendonitis back in 2013, and it put me in a walking boot for 4 months; I knew this wasn’t to be trifled with.)

In terms of the Tallahassee Half—my goal, and my plan—I was *done*.

I had to face the hard facts, and shut down my training and surrender my goal.

It was sobering.

But life is full of unexpected twists and turns and hardships. It’s just that way.

Kind of like missing 4 days of Blog Posts in a Lenten Series.

I had no intention of skipping those days, but last week just threw some curve balls at me, some anticipated, some not.

But (as Michael Caine said in Batman, and Rob Brydon so eloquently imitated in The Trip,

“Why do we fall, Mr. Wayne?”

The only real option, it seems is to get up and start walking (or crawling) again.

Or writing.

A couple weeks ago, I started running again. In order to be safe, I decided to return to a “couch-to-5k” program that I’d used before, so that I could make sure I didn’t stress my ankle out too much. I pack it in ice, and do stretches, and take Motrin.

(In other words, remind myself that I’m not 25 anymore.)

It’s been working, but make know mistake, it’s a bit embarrassing in light of my ambitions: instead of celebrating my 2nd half, I’m doing 3 minute runs followed by 3 minutes of walking.

Not exactly setting any records.

But this is what life is: a constant exercise in adjustments and tweaks to new circumstances.

I’d planned to write every day in Lent.

That didn’t happen.

But I’m still committed to this project, and though it’s embarrassing to have to admit that I missed 4 days because I couldn’t adequately balance my schedule, I really have no choice, except to sit down in front of my computer again, and *start over.*

It’s no sin to be fragile and imperfect.

Welcome to the human race… again.