Have you ever been emotionally stuck in a past season of your life? Or maybe even a past event? If your experience is like mine, some combination of nostalgia, guilt, sentiment, regret and childish merriment keeps lifting that memory to the forefront of your mind.

Part of embracing the impermanence of things, which is the theme of the EP “Everything Has Changed,” has meant actively engaging the passage of time. In other words, I can’t go back and make the darker things different and I can’t go back and make the lighter moments last longer. What I can do, in light of how quickly life moves, is set my eyes on what I have been given and those to whom I have been given today.

In a sense, I choose to live out a prayer I pray every Lent, and one that will be featured in the book I am releasing with Scott Erickson this February,..

“Though I am impacted by my past, may I never be fully defined by it.”

This song is another way to pray those words.

LYRICS:

O, we were just seventeen,
You were good to me
That’s the way I remember it.
We were candles and kerosene
We were warm at least
While we watched our friends burn
Remembering what we had
I don’t want it back
And then we were cold at night
When the fire died
Down to glowing embers
I was looking up at the sky
When you broke the silence
And whispered those words.
Remembering what you said
I wish I could forget
O, how I wish I’d  those years back now
When I chased you down in my lover’s pain
O, how I wish I had seen it then
Every now becomes when with the dying days
We were candles and kerosene
O now I have strength in me
I’ve a home, you see
I’ve a wife and children
And you’re just a memory
Like a fire’s heat
When the morning breaks (sets) in.
Remembering who I am

 

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