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Being who you are
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Wednesday, January, 13, 2010
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by John Fischer
All you had to do was to be what you've always wanted to be.
Welcome back to the love that is in your heart
From the song "Welcome Back" by the group Love song
Sounds like a simple thing to be who you are, but it is not. It's an illusive goal. It seems like the harder you try to be somebody, the further away you get from being who you are.
Marti and I listened to some of my early music last weekend and I found out, through her ears, something I hadn't heard before. My very first songs were the most pure, unpretentious and original of all of my music. They were the most "me." I never noticed this before because I always heard the music in terms of the production quality, which improved greatly as time went on.
But from the second album on, you can hear something else taking place—influences from somewhere other than within. There's the Judy Collins sound, the "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" intro, the James Taylor guitar, the Billy Joel arrangement… and every time I sang, I tried to match the musical influences the arrangement took on, and somehow, it wasn't me. But you hear the first album and, as hokey as it has always seemed to me, I can't deny the innate beauty of the fact that it isn't trying to be anything but what it is. And in that same manner we all find out who we are by not trying to be anything else.
That's why Love Song is onto something when they marry true identity to a kind of homecoming: "Welcome back to what you knew was right from the start." Though we can't always be it, consciously, we know who we are. A relationship with Jesus involves a total acceptance of who we are through an unearned, uncluttered reality.
Lord give us grace to walk forward, unmasked... vulnerable… liberated.
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