what’s really muffling out the music of our lives

It’s late Tuesday night and the plane’s supposed to have turned its steel beak to the sky hours ago but we’re still at the gate waiting, waiting and making big talk about small things.

“You always carry your guitar with you on trips like this?” Dustin, he’s a West Texas man moved up to Colorado to work with Compassion.

And he’s asking Shaun, a Texan transplanted to Tennessee to make music for Compassion, and they both glance over at that beat-up case.

I think that’s black electrical tape stitching up the far side. I wonder how many stages and buses and miles that guitar case has seen. How many aches it has healed.

Shaun shrugs. “I hadn’t always brought a guitar along.” He sits up straight, runs one hand through his hair.

“But I kept finding my songs came from these trips, these kind of places.”

He gestures, a hand circling out to where we’re headed, like the rubbing of a glass, and I see the places and faces of Guatemala.

I think of it again, how it’s only in the emptiness that a song can sing, how in the hollow of the dark places, the notes resonate, reverberate, carry.

How our lives full of cluttered ease, muffle out the songs. That when we go to the places that strip life back to its barest essence — of courage and love and raw, unmasked pain — our hearts feel again, beat again, hear again the haunting music of a beautiful, bleeding humanity.

Maybe it’s this: God hides with the poor and in the pain and we can only witness Him at His most beautifully creative work in the places needing redemption.

Maybe we are only at our most beautiful work in the same places too — the places where we don’t hide behind the distractions of stuff, where we finally empty our hands of all our possessions and idols and come to God empty and ready. The places where we can make art with tears.

Where the notes can finally soar in the space.

Or maybe Someone did: “”It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:25 NIV)

It’s nearly 1:00 am EST when I follow Shaun into a hotel in Guatemala City and I’ve been coming almost 24 hours to find this place, this place where God makes his home with the poor. Why again do we strive for riches? I watch Shaun’s guitar case bang up against his leg, his back pack swaying.

I wonder what kind of richer music the whole world would make if all our stuffed lives grew emptier of things and wealthier in love. Aren’t these the acoustics of the happiest freedom.

Down a darkened hall in the early morning hours, I can hear humming echo in the vaulting space.

::

Come make music with us in Guatemala?
Would you look into the faces of these children today
— and together sing a new song?

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Photo: a Guatemalan doll waiting for us on the pillow of our hotel room
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