And Then God Created The Artist

Hello there, blog reader!  We're happy to have you here with us in our little corner of the world.  I am known around Goshen Baptist Church as the guy who plays the jazzy stuff on the piano while the congregation is trying to sing.  I have to behave myself, because many of the musical ideas I have, while interesting to me, may be wholly inappropriate if executed!  I've learned that not everything I play has to be personalized, although, in all honesty, I am most artistically satisfied when I can "do my own thing" with a song.  In this regard, I find myself in good company.  The greatest composer to come out of West Chester (and possibly America!) was Samuel Barber.  His first gig came when he was 12 years old, playing organ over at First Presbyterian Church, just a few miles away.  He was soon fired for the way he played the hymns!  You heard me right, the composer of Adagio for Strings, one of the most beloved of American compositions, got his walking papers shortly into his first gig- a very inauspicious beginning to an illustrious career.  That's like cutting a kid from your football team who grows up to be Tom Brady.

Here's the thing, if you give an artist any opportunity at all, he or she is going to try to do something personal and expressive with it.  God makes some of us to be doctors, while others are astronauts.  And then there are the artists.  We got the test results back- I am an artist.  Like God, I like to communicate who I am by creating things. God is also a doctor and an astronaut, but I relate to him as an artist.  As a child, I listened to music for hours on end, before I had any thought of playing an instrument.  I wanted to feel James Taylor's emotions!  Growing up, the only book of the Old Testament I would read was Psalms.  Makes sense, right?  They are pure emotion.  I wanted to feel what David was feeling in that cave.  Happily, at Goshen Baptist, I found a warm and accepting home for my muse, and I haven't been kicked out of the band (yet).  It is an honor to be involved with the worship music, and I love the "big family" feel of the place.

And that brings me to the prayer I composed (below).  The artist needs a creative outlet for the things he or she is feeling.  One way I've done this is by composing prayers.  As an improviser, I love spontaneity, but as a composer, I love to structure things outside of real time.  The beauty of a great improvisation is the player's ability to roll with the mistakes (and hopefully justify them!).  But with composing, we have time to make things just right.  I found that composing prayers was a good discipline for my artistic temperament.  Of course, I still love to improvise prayers too!

My walk with God started early, at a sleepover in the basement of our house, when my best friend told me what Jesus did for me 2,000 years ago.  I believed it.  My journey took me on a winding path, always feeling Him near, but often not listening to Him!  An intense revival began in my 40's, and, man, I never saw what was coming.  Everything that I idolized fell away, and I just wanted to know Him as best I could.  He sent me zipping back and forth through the Bible, cover-to-cover, no stone unturned.  I needed to know it all.  Sort of like what I had previously done with music.  I went through study Bibles, commentaries, theology books, videos- everything I could find, looking for answers.  I must confess that I was secretly afraid that by taking the Bible apart page-by-page I would find things that would seem irreconcilable in my mind.  I had believed in Him for decades, but I didn't really know His story!  I didn't know First Chronicles from First Corinthians.  What if I end up not liking what I found?  What if a spaceship landed in Obadiah?   I knew that there were a lot of miracles in the Bible, but nobody told me about a spaceship.  If I found that there was a spaceship that people forgot to mention, was I going to have to walk away from the faith I had since I was ten?   Who knows what kinds of things I might find hiding in this book.  It was filled with pages that I thought were dusty and stuffy, way too long, anachronistic, and only read by solemn men in robes.  Surely a kid growing up on Gilligan's Island reruns would never have a personal connection with something as deep and profound as Isaiah.  I had no plans of understanding Ezekiel.  It was too far out of my scope of reality.  I understood Fat Albert.  And Herbie Hancock.  Ezekiel?  Not my thing!

I was amazed by what I found.  It was pretty simple, actually, and goes like this:  God created the universe, man pushed away from God, God rescued man.  Sorry about the spoiler, if you haven't read it.  The Bible is a big rescue plan for you and me.  From the first word to the last it is about your Creator's love for you.  Not "you" in the plural, as in the group of people reading this blog, but you individually.  Specifically, and individually- YOU.  He knows what you're thinking right now, and he loves you.  You can't hide in the crowd.  You have his full attention.  And he came to earth to provide you with a way to Him- "For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day." (John 6:40)

That said, here's the prayer.  You can think of it as an utterance of adoration from an artist to his Maker, and as a way that I've learned to embrace and accept who He has made me to be.

Love Things, by David B. Thomas

Dear God,

I love you and your ways.

I love it when you take a sentence I’ve read a hundred times and suddenly give it life.  You give life where there is emptiness, even death, and this inspires faith and hope in me.

I love when you make some “coincidental” thing happen.  Something only you and I know about, our little secret, both subtle and soul-shaking at the same time.

I love how you speak to me.  Sometimes you yell, usually you whisper.  No one else can hear these stirrings in my soul, and that makes me feel loved.

I love how you calm me by showing me just a little bit of yourself.  You never show too much, you’re saving that.  Every time I get a glimpse of you my reality is transformed and my direction is changed.  A bigger glimpse, and I’m ready to change the world.

I love your unfathomable depths.  I don't understand the first sentence of the Bible!  What was before "in the beginning"?  How did you "create the heavens and earth"?  You leave the big questions dangling and make us walk by faith.  The very questions that push the proud away make your children adore you all the more.

I love the world of nature you created.  Every creature, every plant, every rock is a miracle to me.  These may be commonplace to a non-believer, but they are wonderful to me.  I don't take sunsets lightly.  Or childbirths.  There is nothing "normal" about these things.  Everything tastes better knowing you.

I love how you are living in me.  I feel the war going on in my soul, just as you said I would.  I know this broken condition isn’t forever.  Come, quick!

I love when you are the last thing on my mind as I fall asleep.  I love our conversations as I nod off.  They fill me with a sweetness unlike any other.

I love when you are the first thing on my mind when I wake up.  One “Good Morning” from you and I dance through the day.  What can the world do to me?  Who can be against me?  I am in your right hand!

I love laying my petitions at your feet and walking away from them.  I wish I were better at this.  It brings me comfort knowing that my needs are before you.

I love to worship you, to feel a love unlike any other, for one greater than any other, worth so much more than I could ever give.  Oddly, I love feeling this small, because it makes you feel all the greater, my Father.

I love that we have our times to get alone together.  Sitting on a train, going for a walk, you always speak right up.  No one around me knows what is going on in my mind.  “Don’t mind me,” I think to myself, “I’m over here hanging out with the creator of the universe.  Have you met Him?”

I love the point of surrender, seeing the real value of everything in life, seeing the beginning of my eternity, knowing my flesh will return to dust, and being perfectly fine with that.

I love when I feel you transforming me, when I can look back and see real change, when I find myself making choices that shock me because they are so unlike the old me.  You show me my sin to show me just how much you love me.  You show me your wrath to show me just how much my salvation cost your Son.  You are endlessly patient.  10,000 years is a day to you, Mount Everest is a grain of sand.  Our mortal bodies will soon be swallow up by an eternal, perfect love.  That I would have any role whatsoever in your awesome plot of love and hope is beyond my imagination.

I love devouring your word and having you speak through it.   Some people read the Bible and feel nothing.  I read it and am comforted, convicted, grounded, and inspired.  This creates a great love for you in my soul.

I love coming to you, the Living Water, when I am thirsty, and finding an unchanging God who is always present to refresh me if only I take His gift. In returning and rest I am saved.

I love that you are always present, and that your word never fades away.  You are the only one worthy of my confidence.  You are the only eternal life.

These are all things I love to think about.  Most of all, I love that you love me, Creator of the universe, Precious Lamb, Sanctifying Spirit.  This is beyond my comprehension.  You died for my faults so you we could love each other for eternity.  There is no “till death do us part,” in this marriage.  Death will only bring us more together, You and I, Eternal Father and adoring child.

These are just a few of the things I love about you, Living God of my Salvation and Strength, always near, beginning and end, with me on the mountains and in the valleys, powerful and personal, astonishing and wonderful to me.

Amen.

David Bennett Thomas is a professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he teaches music composition and theory.  He likes to write and record original music for choruses, chamber groups, jazz musicians, and to arrange traditional hymns and spirituals in a jazz style. http://www.davidbthomas.com