Baby Steps

It snowed in Nashville again today, well, what they call "snow" down here in the South. I slept in until 10:00 a.m., looked out my window and it was as if the snowflakes were dancing in the air. Waltz music would have been the perfect accompaniment. This beautiful sight is exactly what I needed to see this morning. I avoided waking up because lately I've been feeling hopeless and unmotivated. This has been something I've been battling since the year began. Time off has been great but too much time off can be a tough thing to handle.

On Monday mornings I usually go to the gym and run like a madman to start off my week with some ounce of discipline. Today is President's Day so the gym is closed. After trying to work out in my house, which consisted of jump roping (with no jump rope) I figured I'd just try to run outside and endure the cold.

I had this thought about halfway through the run: "Thank you for each step of this run Lord." I was thinking about each step I took, and how all of the individual steps added together would turn into a couple miles. Lately I haven't been thankful for the small steps in life's journey. I've been dreading each step, each detail, the grind of each day. For example, when I write a song, I write it one phrase or lyric at a time, one note, one melody, one chord, one beat. All of those then combine together in harmony to hopefully turn into a beautiful song. But thinking about completing the song, or completing another record for that matter is too overwhelming - overwhelming enough to prevent me from taking the first step, baby steps. So today I'm thankful for the small steps.

Life's too overwhelming to look at with our finite eyes. I need faith today, in spite of my own weakness, that I can enjoy God in the small steps, right now, no matter where He's ordering my steps to go, I can appreciate the small things, TODAY.

Sorry if for some reason you thought that I have it all together all of the time. I'm growing in faith, but there are some things that I continue to struggle with. Like the battle of believing what is true despite how I feel. That's a tough one for me. But what is true stands no matter what.

My friend said something powerful to me last friday. He said how most of us "feed of of lies and only dabble in the truth, thus ending up dual minded in our ways and luke warm in our faith." That hit me pretty hard. A lot of my life I've meditated on fears, lies, and looked at one verse of scripture for a little bit, dabbling, nibbling, but then going back to my fears. The Truth of God is sincerely the ONLY thing that can set our minds free from being captivated by the deceptions we have been exposed to and will be exposed to every day as long as we're here on earth. I have much more to say on this matter, but I gotta go sing a song with Jimmy Needham in 30 minutes!!

Thanks to all who joined in the Live Chat yesterday, appreciate you guys. Happy President's Day.

Downtime Downsizing

I'm sitting in a close friend of mine's house looking out his window at the Smokey Mountains on a sun shiny day in North Carolina. I decided to take a day to get away from the business of life. I made the drive last night, it was only supposed to take 3 & 1/2 hours but there was a rock slide that blocked the only main road that leads to Murphy. I had to detour through a whole bunch of back-mountain winding and wooded roads in the dark, rain and fog. It ended up taking 7 HOURS! At one point I came around a corner and there was a tree that fell into the road and I hit the breaks and slid right underneath it. Thank God I have an Accord and not a Hummer (yea I just said that) or it would have smashed my windshield. There's lot more to the adventure, really, some wrong turns that cost me an extra hour, no cell phone service the whole time... It's my intention to write a song about it but I have to let the anger and trauma subside before I get deep into that one :)

The main reason I'm blogging today is to update you all on what I've been up to lately. I have exactly one week before I leave for the Winter Wonderslam Tour. I'm super excited. I have a new band, a drummer and a bass player, their nicknames are Garfield and Snoopy. You'll definitely be getting to know them in the next few months.

I had to jump off of the CreationFest Tour a week early because I was coughing up green mucus (nasty!!). To clear up any rumors, I was "presumably" diagnosed with the H1-N1 virus aka the Swine Flu. I got it while I was on vacation in Milwaukee visiting my parents. The doctor said it would cost $250 dollars to test me for the swine flu and it would take 3 days for the result, so I'm not completely sure if I had it, but we treated it just in case. I stayed in the house for 5 days straight and missed my flight to San Diego :( BUT, God reminded me that He wants to spend time with me, that He desires and deserves my attention and that I'm wasting my life if I give it anything less than Him. We're still working on that one.

Besides getting ready for tour, writing, avoiding trees in the road and all of the other busy stuff in life I'm "down-sizing" and simplifying my possessions. Forgive the term, I recently became addicted to The Office and am watching from episode 1 all the way through. Anyways, I'm having to move from 2 rooms back to 1 due to a new roommate so I'm getting rid of all the stuff I don't need, don't want, or never should have had in the first place. It's very freeing to simplify our lives and clean out once in a while.

That's it for now, oh, one more thing. Monday night I'll be doing another live chat at 7 central time at:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/b-reith

So please join me for that and come out if the tour is in your city!! Promise I won't be so quiet on the blog front in the month to come :)

Man vs. Time

So we spent our day off yesterday in Kansas City, well, most of the day. Our bus didn't arrive until 1:00 in the afternoon. But luckily DJ Promote has a friend in K.C. who took us around the city for the day. He happens to work for a company called MK-12, who did the motion graphics for James Bond "Quantum of Solace", "Stranger Than Fiction" (Will Ferrell), The Beatles Rock Band and a whole lot of awesome stuff (www.mk12.com). So we stopped by his office, I was like a little kid in there freakin out over all of the projects they've worked on. I think I said "that's super fresh" 27 times.

So we checked out a bunch of artistic stuff around the city, some graffiti spots, the art museum, Broadway's coffee (yummy). At the end of the night I was sitting in the back seat on our drive back to the bus. After this long day of seeing so many different kinds of art, influences, historical pieces, my brain clicked into 5th gear. I started thinking of some of the things that I would love to try to learn or get better at. Then I felt this overwhelming pressure of how there's no way that I can do it all. I stopped and analyzed why the sudden paranoia... Hmm... It's because there's not enough time. I suddenly viewed my life as a timeline that I am up against. We are all battling time. All of us are on a physical timeline, our human lives are not eternal. We're all getting older each moment, every breath, every heartbeat. It's a hard reality to face, but it's reality.

I kept thinking, if we had forever to do all of the things we needed or wanted to do, there would be no stress, we would just live and exist. I never thought about time like this before. When God originally created man/woman He made them to live forever. When Adam and Eve chose to disobey God sin and death entered the world. That made our lives on earth physical and temporary. But our spirit is still eternal. I believe what the Bible has to say about eternity, that after we die we will either spend eternity with God or apart from Him, and that the Way to us imperfect people having a relationship with a perfect God is through Jesus Christ. Unfortunately a lot of people have misrepresented Jesus, and the church has made some huge mistakes over the years, and people are blaming God for them. Oh but that's another blog on another day, for right now I certainly don't have enough time :)

So, because we're on a timeline, our decisions DO matter: the choices we make, what we choose to believe, how we spend our time, energy, what we invest into, it's so important to do it all in view of eternity. For our time on earth is very precious, we are but a breath.

Thousands of years ago Moses blogged a similar prayer. You can still read it today: Psalm 90

Now is Not Forever

Don't Tap Out