All I know is if God wakes you up at 3am, or your dog wakes you up and God tells you to get up.. you get up. He won't let me even try to ignore Him & go back to sleep because He's blasting the same rotation of awful country songs in my head that I hear all day at work from the only radio station we get, where at the end of every hour, they start the same rotation all over again. I'm trying to listen (to God, not the music), something I don't do very good or very often. So here's some middle of the night thoughts...
First off, this might seem like one of those forwarded emails where you have to send it to 10 people or else you're not really a Christian or something, but it's not. This, I believe, is something God woke me up in the middle of the night to talk about.. if for nobody else, then for myself.. I really don't care if not a single person reads this or if everyone who does read it just thinks I'm rambling, I just need to get it out.
On that "About Me" thing on my Myspace page, all I've ever had there was 3 words: "I'm a Christian". I guess that's the only thing that mattered when I made this page, however many years ago, before there became college classes on how to build a Myspace page and people considered it the greatest compliment ever when they were put on your top friends list (and extremely offended if they were replaced).. Yes, I'm still a Christian and I always will be. But man oh man, that word just seems to have lost all meaning.
I've had the privilege of growing up in a Christian family. My parents didn't shelter their kids. They let us make mistakes and learn from them, and they guided us, loved us, and helped us whenever we needed anything. I thank God for that. I also thank God for my dad's taste in music. Other than my hardcore/metal phase in high school, we've basically shared a lot of the same CD's my whole life. I live 3 ½ hours away from my parents now, so whenever I "borrow" a CD from my dad, its mine for a long time, and vice versa. The only music of mine that my dad never really seemed to care about, other than that hardcore period of my life (hey, it was fun at the time), was my Christian music. I'm not gonna get into the whole Christian band vs. Christians in a band thing, but he didn't dislike my Christian music because it was Christian.. most of it just wasn't as good as what he grew up on. He liked music for music, and occasionally he'd skip over tracks because it struck an emotional nerve. I know I've told this story in some interviews when I was in the Huntingtons, but when I was about 5 years old I remember my dad blasting a Ramones tape in his truck. He'd rewind "Beat on the Brat" over & over again until the tape got distorted. 14 years later, I shared the stage with Joey Ramone. Everything leading up to that point in my life can somehow be traced back to my dad beating "Beat on the Brat" into my brain.
But somewhere in the middle there, around the early teen years, I discovered there were bands who played good music, and they did it because they loved God. I honestly loved a lot of these bands back then and I still break out their CD's every now & then. What happened to that? I mean, I guess there's still "Christian bands" out there, but are there any good ones? Does it really matter? Probably not. I don't think God really cares whether or not we listen to Christian music or play Christian music. What matters is how we LIVE our lives while we are alive. What matters is if we are ALIVE, while we're breathing this air. Nothing else really matters.
I've been feeling lately that a lot people I know have been coasting through life, but not really living it. Myself included in that. I think we're all forgetting why we're here, what's important, what matters. A lot of us are ok with God being in the background. He needs to be evident in 100% of our lives. If I'm gonna say "I'm a Christian", that needs to be more than just a clarification of which religion I am part of. There needs to be nothing religion about it. I need to show it in my life.
I'm sorry if this sounds preachy, but I hardly ever go to church so I'm not taking this from anything I've heard recently or anything like that, this is just something God woke me up about in the middle of the night… and I truly hope this helps wake us all up.