a flashback

Mars Hill put out a live cd a few years ago when Aaron was still there. I was looking through boxes and not too long ago found it buried in the bottom of one.

Aaron said some really great stuff before one of the songs...check it out:

"If I'm really honest, my natural movement is downward. You know, I so quickly become the cynic. The critic. The guy who can only see whats wrong and points it out to everybody. And everybody loves that guy. I guess I just thought for a long time, you know, I'm just one of the perceptive ones, that kind of thing. I'm one of the smart ones, standing in the back of the room throwing stones at everything. Now it just seems that I think I was afraid. I just think I was scared. It is so easy to be a cynic. It is so easy to find and point out what's wrong with things. I mean, anybody can do that. But it takes courage to believe. and in this world, where there's so much darkness, so much screwed up sin, it takes the deepest kind of courage to stand up and find the good and hold out for hope. And so when we choose to go upward, to find God's fingerprints everywhere, we are choosing to really live because cynicism is a dead end."

And then he read what has become a favorite quote of mine over the last few years, from GK Chesterton:

"The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again!"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again!" to the sun; and evening, "Do it again!" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all dasies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."