In about fifteen minutes, I get to head down to the stage for practice for the morning's worship set.

...man, I love playing the bass. I missed it. In the last year, I've probably spent a total of about five hours with the instrument strapped around my shoulder, fingers on the fat and ribbed strings, feet dancing around the cable while the almost sub-audible pulse thumps out from behind me. It's a wonder how I get away from it. It's a matter of priorities, I suppose, but when you find something so thoroughly fulfilling; so cathartic; so tempestuous and relaxing all at the same time...it's a wonder that you ever wander off long enough to prioritize something else.

I don't claim to be a great musician...or even a good one...but I love music. I love playing, I love listening, I love talking about it. I think there is a link between God and music that, even with all of our modern worship music and old-time Gospel and classical choral hymns, I don't think we've found even 1% of yet. When I put on those headphones in the morning and turn on Ben Harper, Lyle Lovett, Eminem, Sarah McLachlan, Extreme, Alanis Morissette, Over The Rhine, the Flecktones, Evanescence, David Lee Roth...I feel God then. I hear him sometimes, my eyes water and my heart pounds when he shows up in the music... I feel like he sneaks right behind that staggered backbeat and delights in the contortions of my face and the twisting in my gut as the guitar lags a sluggish half-beat behind the kick drum and that indescribable feeling of "funk" permeates my torso. I feel like he experiences joy as that solitary matching pair of tears rolls down my cheeks, squeezed out by Sarah's low, ambient regret that she "Forgot to tell you I love you." I feel like he loves to feel me feel the growing, pulsing energy of the distorted guitar and tight snare with a reggae backbeat as 311's "Music" takes me from whatever painted-wall and air-conditioned office mindset I was in to a place that feels a little bit like a dust-dirty version of the Eastern concept of enlightenment. How could that not be of him?

I love music. I've got to run, I'm supposed to be playing it in three minutes.

Peace,
Justin