2023-01-31 00:11:58

HOnEstLy?

“Be true to yourself” is a quote from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. The Original version was “This above all: to thine self be true.
Anybody remember who said that line? If not, don’t feel bad; I had to look it up. It was Polonius, the fool. It’s the fool who encourages us to live by the slogan “Be true to yourself,” and yet we mouth this mantra like it’s gospel.

from Live no Lies by John Mark Comer

Honestly, I like the fact that bold text was just the only way to create an emphasis using a typewriter. You would just move back and type the same letters again. One of my professors told the class not to use it because we have italics for emphasising. - fine for his class but generalised this sounds like saying: “Don’t use candles. We got lightbulbs since the end of the 19th century.” (Did you know they were that old? - I had to look that up.)
Honestly though I like candles. I just checked and a candle still gives enough light to read and write. A single candle - would you imagine that? It’s so romantic to have just the light of a candle. Right now it emits even more light than the screen of my MacBook.
Right now I think I could honestly go on for hours just talking / writing about random little things that I want to keep. Things that I believe or opinions about other things that just …
What I wanted to do however is get back to writing this blog of mine. I left it unattended for a long time. I have been wondering why I started to write a blog in the first place:
And honestly I’m not yet done answering this question. With this not yet figured out I can much less discern whether I will be giving this blog a lot of attention from now on – I could promise monthly posts. But In the long run there is no reason to trust such a promise of mine.
Because honestly and quite frankly there are more than two areas in my life that have gotten a lot of attention for some time and were dropped more or less from on day to the next – never to be picked up again ever since.
Let me tell you one story: I have been playing the drums for a long time in my life. I started at eight years old and I played ever since until I moved out from my parents. Well there has been times when I played more, times when I played less. Sometimes the drums may have been put away in a box for months but I came back and played and I even finally started to play on the stage in our church on Sunday. In the beginning I wanted to play the drums but I had hardly any intrinsic motivation strong enough to keep me practicing. Thankfully God gave me two wonderful parents. My mom and Dad made me play 15 minutes everyday – at least they tried – and apparently tried hard enough because obviously I am still a drummer and not too bad at it. I had four teachers, two of them were proud, two of them were humble – but looking back I think the first two were just too afraid to loose their job.
My first teacher was some guy my Mom must have found through the newspaper or a poster hanging on a streetlight, something like that. He was going to the university to become an expert and teaching kids how to play to make some money along the way. I really learned the basics good at his hands and he taught me some of the most important beats I would still use every time I get back to the drum set to play around. One day though my parents decided I’d better have a teacher from our church (– my version of the story. Ask my mom for a more accurate version)
We used to buy ten lessons from that first teacher so I went to the remaining lessons on the ten lesson ticket and one of these lessons, it may well have been the last one that teacher says to me or my parents: “You will never be a good drummer. You always expect the music to wait for you”
I got the point of this feedback and I think I’m still a long way from perfect but I found it interesting he said that only when I was leaving. And this was not to be the last event of that kind.
Only two years later I guess I switched teachers again because the second teacher left our church. Again my parents decided we should not have him as a teacher after he left our church. So we had our last lesson with him too eventually. And surely enough he pulled out some final feedback for his apprentice: “You will never be a good drummer, because you are left handed.”

I don’t take anything from his feedback. And I went on playing the drums without minding this lie. Honestly I think it is a benefit at least as much as it is an obstacle to be left handed when playing the drums. After all I was not trying to play the guitar. :-)
The story goes on beyond the scope of this article – for the better part of the past ten years I’ve been part of a band in our church, playing the cajon and the drums in services at least on a monthly, for some years a weekly basis.
But honestly I stopped playing more than half a year ago. And that is another story:
I had a girlfriend since spring of 2020 – we got engaged on New Years of 2021 – we got married in august 2022. Now it happens to be quite an important relationship for my life and I want to spend a lot of time with my wife – so it is common for members of our church to step back from serving at church for the first year of their marriage. I decided to do so concerning my role in the worship team. I did not plan to stop playing completely though. That is yet another part of the story: We moved into a small apartment together and a drum set would not fit there. I had plans to visit my parents and seize the opportunity to play the drums there. I never put them into practice though.
Well I visited my parents but I never touched the drum set again.
Honestly I always had excuses.
And that is what I see in many areas of my life. That is why I spend so much of this night just to write this blogpost. Even if nobody reads it. I want to face the lies of my life and honestly ask myself what it is that is worth to me to stay up late for?
I want to know what I am standing up for. I want to know what I am fighting for.
I used to write for hours. Write for pleasure. Write for God. And I still enjoy it honestly. And I think I can still do it for God.
But this is just my means to assemble my thoughts about my life without losing track of the focus entirely I hope.
I honestly like the book of John Mark Comer I quoted up there. It is the second book of him already – I read and liked both of them.
I like reading. I like writing. I like gardening. I like candles. I even like programming – whenever it works (it being my code – with respect to the fact that it’s my responsibility – in most cases :-)
Honestly if all this writing was for no good, there is one that is worth all time, all attention, all the late hours and sleepless nights. It is Jesus.
P.S. Honestly: who would make a candle shaped like a moose that looks like this after just two hours of burning. It looked very cute before it was lit though.
P.P.S.: In all the telling of my story I even forgot to refer to the passage from Live no lies I quoted – that may just be a good example of how I was more focused on my own thoughts than the actual topic – but I said what has to be said though and I'll repeat it: The one thing that should occupy our mind more than we ourself occoupy it is Jesus.