Desperate for Stability

All of us spend our entire lives in order to stabilize ourselves.  We tend to move towards a state of stabilization.  This explains why some of us work very hard while others of us don't—they're both attempts to stabilize.  Those of us who work hard have certain notions of what it means to be ideally stable, and so they build it—careers, wars, revolutions all begin this way.  Those of us who do not work very hard—those of us who may be very lazy, in fact—attempt to maintain a relatively easier mode of stability with high predictability rates and low chances of interruptions.

It's true—unpredictability and chaos are uninvited.  We like it when things are within our realm of understanding.  New things are welcome when we believe it'll help us achieve a new level of stability that we perceive.  So change—smooth ones—always begin with a dawning understanding, a broadening of the mind.  Without it, we are thrown in confusion, and we flail to backtrack to a previous state of things rather than a progressive movement forward.

This is what must be done regarding the Gospel.  Jesus always performs or says something that first broadens your mind, enlarges the capacity of the heart.  Only then can we see that we cannot retreat to a former way of things—in fact, retreating would result in a most destabilizing circumstance since we indubitably have a new paradigm in mind—but we must instead move towards a place that can receive this Gospel.  Such petty attempts at behavior modification is unfounded in retrospect and will result in a slide back into a former construct.

What's great about this is that the world is potentially infinite in possibilities.  God is eternal, and so stability is never fully recognized as the world perceives it—this may seem like unwelcome news at first, but it is actually good; because to us, the very act of chasing Jesus is to achieve complete stability in itself.  The means become the end.  Many of us work in order to reach an accomplishment; the struggle to get there, however, is a nuisance, a step to get where we want to go.  But when we chase Jesus, the struggle is the very act we wish to attain.  The act of running after Christ is in itself our source of pleasure.

A Word

I've always found that I can express myself better through writing, but writing to a beat is ironically liberating.  It might not seem so knowing that I have to follow a specific lengths and rules to fit it, but the constraint is rather a delicious welcome to the flow of writing.  It gives fuller meaning to the art of writing, and I feel that when a beat and my words meet serendipitously, it augments whatever intention I had originally.

Here's an example, one that is truly appropriate, for the beat was provided by Allison Rhee:

Lyrics:

Original like butterscotch, ain't no way this brother stop
And the world keeps testing me, tryna see I'm hard or not
All ya'll can just criticize, I'm not really for the top
I would think that I am so bad, but thank God that part of God
resided in this heart of rock, in the night I heard a knock
all I can for this homeless man, with some pants and shirt and socks
do this for my brother, pops, mother, sis who work a lot
sit and listen, it's in heaven, don't just go treasure the box

I walked oh so blindly, now my God's behind me
set right like a timepiece, do this for my HanBit
One Light, light one for the mind, please, climb these
mountains over through the cold, yeah guess like some pine trees
raise up for the OATH that, Over All There's Hope, man
from the coast to coast, land that I called my homeland
Christians to the dope man, in between and beyond that
sit and listen, it's in heaven, you get in through One Man