Life as of late

So I officially suck at blogging. There's just so much going on that I never know what to talk about or what order to put it in. Therefore, I'm just going to ramble and hope that you guys find some sort of entertainment from it.

I've become the official bassist for the cmc. It's so much fun. I never realized how much I loved playing bass until I was in like 3 bands playing all kinda of music from Bob Dylan to Hannah Montana to Emery. It's really funny. But it's been a really awesome experience trying out different styles and different instruments. I'm even playing the shaker and tambourine (at the same time) in a song. It's wonderful.

I've been writing a lot lately, songs I mean. Because clearly I haven't been writing blogs. I wrote a love song the other day. My first love song ever. It's pretty cool and completely out of my style. It's great. I'm gonna try to demo it soon so that you guys can hear it. I'm currently work on my second official master and working on a third master on the side. The third one is a really chill song that's includes two different acoustic guitar parts, cello, violin, maybe some djembe and shaker. It's so cool sounding. Really different for me.

This is the worst blog ever. I never know what to write. Next week we're going to Nashville and meeting with different labels and industry people, basically learning about the industry that we all want to somehow get involved with. After that we have spring break which I'm excited about, but also incredibly bummed about cause after spring break we only have 4 weeks left. I can't believe time has flown by so quickly. I love everyone here so much, we're an amazing bunch and it's going to be one of the hardest things I've ever done to leave all these amazing people. Man, I don't even want to think about it. So i'm gonna stop writing about it.

So this is the worst blog ever. I'm sorry. If ever any of you want to know about my life at cmc just email me and i can give you some more info/specifics. As for now I suck at this so i'm gonna quit while I'm ahead.

Love you all!!!!

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So I realize I haven't blogged in a while. Sorry about that!! I've been really busy trying to make amazing music and being with amazing people and I've forgotten about separating time to write about what's going on in my life.

Last time I blogged it was the beginning of my journey at CMC. Now here I am, one month into this amazing experience, and I've never loved anything more in my life. Other than Jesus.

This place is amazing. I've learned so much already and it's only been 4 weeks. Every single person here has already begun to change my life somehow. It never ceases to astound me how much God has already shown up here. All of us have already had so many awesome God moments, whether it's through our own music or someone else's. Through 4 hour long prayers sessions or deep meaningful conversations at 3 in the morning. God has manifested His love for us in so many ways I'm beginning to lose track.

This past week our first master recordings were due. It was intense. We sat in the cafe together and Tom and Warren literally iChated as we played our songs for the whole class to hear and commented on our tracks. It was incredibly nerveracking. These guys have been in the industry for YEARS, so they know what they're talking about. Overall, they liked my master, though there were a few spots that needed better mixing. It came out really cool though. Maybe I'll post it on here some time.....

This week at CMC live I'm going to be playing the bass and the djembe for one of the acts. It's gonna be funny. I'm not much of a percussionist or a bassist, so I'm not sure how this is going to go.

In about an hour I'm heading back into the studio and I'm going to start working on some new tracks to master. My goal is to have an EP by the end of the semester so that I can maybe start doing local shows and sell them. I'm actually also considering sending it in to some labels, but we'll see how that goes......

Also, I'm going to record one of my songs "Nameless" and see if I can send it to Not for Sale and/or Invisible Children to see if they'll use it for their campaigns. Again, well see how that goes......

Part of the reason I love everyone here is because we're all obsessed with Lost. I love anyone that loves Lost.

Well, that's all I can think of for right now.

Morning Moshes, Fictional Characters and Sharky's Cantina

So going off of the last blog, I've finally started to live by the slogan, Keep Moving Forward.

I have issues with change. I'm really bad at transitioning into new situations. So when I drove up the CMC driveway last week I was terrified!! Excited, yes, but terrified.

CMC stands for the Contemporary Music Center and it's this amazing semester long program where all you do is eat, sleep and breathe music. It's really, really amazing. I'm absolutely in love with this place. It was hard at first, to get rid of my fears and reservations about everyone and everything. But now, it feels like I've been here for months. It seems that even though we've only been here a week me and the rest of the 20 students have already become a family. It's quite adorable.

We eat every meal together everyday and it's become quite customary every morning during breakfast for some of the boys to have "the morning mosh" to ready themselves for the rest of the day. This time consists of hardcore screamo music blasting over the intense speakers in the cafe (AKA the cafeteria/classroom) and some of the boys start hardcore dancing and moshing. It's hilarious.

We have two classes every day, each an hour long from 9:30-11:30ish and then we have lunch and then practicum from 1-3 almost every day where we just learn how to record and do lights and stuff. It's pretty amazing.

Everyday after 3 we're free to do whatever the heck we want, but usually us artists track majors gotta be working on our music, whether that be writing new songs, recording, practicing with our bands, or just having bomb conversations that inspire new songs.

We have 2 professors, Warren and Tom, and they're both out of their minds. The other day, John, our RD, told us that they're basically like fictional characters and as the week progressed I discovered that that was definitely true. They're the strangest men I ever met in my life. I'll post stories later on but right now I only have a limited time to write this.

This week I'm gonna be playing at CMC Live, which is the concert we have here at CMC once a week. I'm so pumped. I had to put together my own band, pick the songs, arrange them, and perfect them for tomorrow so that we can be critiqued and have to change everything. It's gonna be great.

Tonight we went out for dinner to this little place called Sharky's Cantina. We stuffed 12 people into a 7 passenger van with a packed trunk of crap. It was crazy. We all thought we were gonna die. It was hilarious. Twelve kids in a tiny van listening to screamo music talking about the randomest stuff ever. Hilarious.

Okay, I gotta go record. My tech guy is summoning me. I'll write more soon!!

Love you all!!

Keep Moving Forward

A couple of months ago I found myself in the same place I was almost all of last semester doing the exact same thing as I did almost every night. I found myself in my living room in my apartment doing homework. After a couple of hours of my brain just melting with the sheer boredom of doing statistics I decided to turn our TV on and see what was on. After changing a couple of channels I learned a fantastic thing.

Meet the Robinsons was on.

Now, for those of you who don't know what Meet the Robinsons is, let me enlighten you. Meet the Robinsons is an animated movie that's just adorable and entertaining and teaches you a lot about life. I mean, yes, it is a kid's movie, but so what? It's funny. So I watched it.

As I watched this movie for the second time I was struck by something that I didn't really pay attention to the first time I watched it. The main theme of the movie: Keep Moving Forward

At first the repetition of this slogan really annoyed me but then when I looked passed that I really liked this idea. I started to really think about what "keep moving forward" really means and then I realized that this slogan reminds me of a story I once heard.

In Genesis 19 there's this really intense story about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Basically, these two angels come to town and go live in this dude named Lot's house for a couple of days. While they're living their the men of the town come to Lot's place and tell him to bring the angels out so they could rape them.

Intense, right?

Yea... Well Lot says no to the men and he even offers up his daughters to be raped so that the men would leave the angels alone. In turn, the angels aren't very happy and they end up telling Lot to get out cause they were gonna destroy the place since there were no holy, Godly men around. When Lot, his wife, and his children leave the angels tell them only one thing:

DO NOT LOOK BACK!!

That was the one rule that the angels gave them so that they wouldn't be "swept away when the city [was] punished". But of course, Lot and his family being human and this being the bible, Lot's wife HAD to look back at the city that was being destroyed.

And what were the repercussions of this?

Lot's wife turned into salt.

Yea.... Salt.

Of ALL the things!! God turned her into salt. I'm sure that her turning into salt has some deep meaning but I'm not gonna focus on that. I'm gonna focus on the fact that she went against what God and the angels told her to do.

Why would she do that?

Didn't she know that God is faithful to his word? Didn't she realize that something bad would happen?

I think she made the same choice that every single one of us makes in our lives on a daily basis. As humans, we ALWAYS look back at our pasts, even though God has told us not to because he has something so much greater for us in the future.

I know I personally am always dwelling on the past, no matter how much I realize that that's a bad idea. The reason for this is that our memories are sometimes stronger than our wills to look towards the future. We're so scared of leaving the comfort of the things that have already happened because we fear the unknown. No matter how hard the past may be, it's easier to trust what's already happened then to trust something we have no clue about.

But in order to move on we have to realize that we can't continue looking back. When God calls us forward, towards him, he's calling us away from those things in the past. He doesn't want us to live our lives constantly looking at Him and not looking at the things that are over.

We must always Keep Moving Forward.

Does that intro make sense now?

Keep Moving Forward.

It's a great way to live your life.

I am Julia Roberts

The story of Hosea reminds me of the movie "Pretty Woman." We are Julia Roberts and God is Richard Gere. We are the prostitute and God is the man who can get any woman he wants and have everything he wants, but still for some reason picks and chooses us.

The whore.

We have so many other lovers, and God knows that. But He'll still do everything and anything he can to save us and love us, even though we in NO way deserve it.

Gomer, Hosea's wife, is the epitome of a whore. She has a loyal, amazing husband but still chooses to have affairs with other lovers. She even eventually sells herself into slavery. And through all this Hosea deeply and truly loves his wife.

In that day and age buying your wife out of slavery and still accepting her as your wife and the mother of your children was a HUGE deal.

Even today it would be.

It tarnished his reputation and was the subject of much gossip in Israel.

It RUINED him.

But he didn't care.

Why?

Because he LOVED his wife.

How many times have we cheated on God? How many times have we chosen our "other lovers" over him? Whether it's sex, pornography, alcohol, drugs, eating disorders, cutting, we put those things before God, our wonderful, loving, loyal husband.

We think it doesn't matter. That God will understand that we are set in our ways. That we can never change. But that's the furthest thing from the truth.

Yes, God loves us unconditionally. Through whatever lover we choose over Him, He still loves us. But just because you love someone doesn't mean you have to accept the things they do that you know are hurting them. It's for that very reason that you shouldn't accept that self-inflicted pain. That self-destructive behavior.

In the book of Hosea, God spends chapters 4-11 yelling at Israel for all the atrocities they've committed. He reminds them of the covenant He made with them when He brought them to the Promised Land that they would always serve and worship Him as their LORD and Savior. But look at what they did instead. They prostituted themselves to different lovers and idols and had completely forgotten the God who had saved them from their hardest moments. And as He is yelling at them all of a sudden in chapter 11, His tone changes. The damned harlots He was just punishing become his sons and daughters.

His children.

The ones He always loved.

The story of the rebellious, prodigal son is a familiar one in the bible. A story cherished for ages. But what we fail to remember is the Old Testament laws about rebellious sons.

In Deutoronomy 21:18 and 21 the law very clearly states that "if a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father...then all the men in his town shall stone him to death."

Stoning for being disobedient and rebelling against your parents?!?!?! That's a little extreme!! But the Jewish people followed that law because it was a law that Moses wrote and that God approved of. And yet in Hosea God does the very opposite. In chapter 11 He tells the tribe of Ephraim and Israel that He cannot and will not give up on them or hand them over.

Why?

Because they are His sons and daughters. His bridegroom. He loves them too much to give them the punishment they deserve.

God loves us just as He loved Israel and Ephraim.

God loves us just as Hosea loved Gomer.

God loves us just as Richard Gere loved Julia Roberts.

Even though we are prostitutes that have done nothing but cheat on Him and serve other lovers before serving Him, He is lovingly asking us to return to Him. He wants to "heal [our] waywardness" and "love [us] freely" (Hosea 14:4) because He is no longer angry at us for the things that we've done.

We are all Julia Roberts, but luckily God is Richard Gere.

He is thrilled to be our knight in shining armor.

Stretch limo and all.

The Wall

In our lives we experience a lot of heartache.

A lot of pain and suffering.

A lot of bad decisions.

And every time we experience one of those things we put a brick down. Eventually, those bricks start adding up and eventually those bricks become a wall. And as time goes on that wall gets bigger and bigger until we can't see the other side anymore.

We become trapped.

We can no longer see the beauty and goodness on the other side. That feeling of the sun beating down on your skin, that sensation that tingles down your spine when you feel a breeze. Those are all gone. It becomes a life dictated by the boundary that that wall creates.

Our initial instinct is to get passed that wall. It's to get to the other side. And we will do whatever it takes to get there. We will walk for days, months, years even, to find an opening in the wall. To find a way in.

Or

We will try to climb that wall and no matter how many times we fall we continue the climb.

But never do we really consider breaking that wall down.

I mean, c'mon, the wall is freaking HUGE. We could NEVER tear down that wall.

We want to get passed that wall but we don't really want to deal with it. The wall isn't really your problem, it's the whole getting to the goodness thing that's your main goal. The wall is just an obstacle.

This reminds me of the Wall of Jericho. For those of you who don't know the story and for those of you that do but need a little reminder, here's what happened.

There's this guy named Joshua. Joshua is a faithful servant of the LORD and will do whatever the LORD asks of him. One day God tells Joshua that the city of Jericho, in which Joshua and his people are currently camping near, is "in [his] hands" (Joshua 6:2). Now, that's a pretty huge gift. Joshua was probably more than thrilled to be receiving such a grand reward. But there was a catch. God wasn't just going to hand this city over to Joshua, as much as Joshua might have wanted it to be that way. Rather, Joshua had to follow some instructions. The only way he would receive this gift was if he gathered his men, seven priests, and the ark of the covenant and walked around the outer wall of this city for six days.

What the heck?!?!

That's a really random request as well as a lot of walking. But the LORD assured Joshua that if he did this, on the seventh day the wall would come crumbling down and Joshua would be able to claim his land (after a little bit of a war, of course). So as crazy as it sounded, Joshua trusted his LORD and did exactly as He said.

Joshua could have just as easily done his own thing. He could have gone in through the entrance of the city with his men and killed all its inhabitants. He could have used his men as a human ladder and climbed over it. He could have done so many things. But he chose to do the one thing that not many others would have done in that situation. He trusted God.

Why?

Because he had faith that his LORD would do exactly as he had promised.

And what happened on the seventh day, you might be asking? Exactly what God said would happen. The wall came crumbling down and Joshua claimed the city of Jericho.

We want so bad just to get to the other side of our walls. We are willing to climb over and risk hurting ourselves. We're willing to walk for days and days even though eventually we'll always wind up at that wall again. We will do whatever it takes to get to that goodness and beauty without having to deal with our walls.

But the only way to that goodness.

The only true way to that beauty.

Is by tearing down that wall.

Is by trusting God enough to tear down that wall.

We all have a lot of bricks.

We've all experienced a lot of heartache.

A lot of pain and suffering.

A lot of bad decisions.

We all have a wall preventing us from experiencing the joy that God wants us to experience.

And the only way that we can experience that. The only way that we can once again feel the sun beating down on our skin and once again feel the sensation that tingles down our spine when we feel a breeze, is by tearing down that wall. It's by confronting our heartache and our pain and suffering and our bad decisions and allowing God to tear them down.

Yes, the bricks and debris will always remain. But they'll be scattered and destroyed. They will only remain there as a memory. So that on that day that we stumble upon them again, we can look at them and say:

Man! That was a HUGE wall.

And now a word from our sponsor.....

The other day I was in the car listening to my iPod, watching the scenery ouside the window change from trees, to water, to fast food places, to high way, to trees, to water and I had a thought. You see, this is nothing unusual for me. Not the thought thing, but the whole listening to my iPod in the car thing. I find that my best thinking is done in cars, even though I myself am absolutely terrified to drive one. The thought I had followed another thought, which will be blogged about shortly, and this thought was, I should start a blog.

I've been considering this whole blog thing for a while but something always seemed to come up. Either life problems or life solutions or finals. There was always something keeping me from sharing the thoughts that I had on a daily basis and about the experiences I've encountered in my life. But after this thought I had the other day I realized that I should just start this darned blog that keeps haunting me everywhere I go.

So here it is. My blog. I will be sharing with you guys a vast array of knowledge including my thoughts on faith, love, life, music and most importantly, my thoughts on God and how he's worked both in my life and in the lives of others. There also might be some ramblings here and there, just to warn you.

So without further adieu,

Hello blogging world. My name is Sam and I am honored to make your acquiantance.