(The following post was written at the end of last August. It marked the first serious post I ever wrote about anything ever, and my best post about mercy to quote the rapper Big K.R.I.T. all the way through it. With all that is going on in the world, and with my mind drifting back seven years to when Hurricane Katrina crept closer to this landmass between Louisiana and Mobile, it seemed better to me to revisit this post rather than produce something new today. I pray we will never take mercy for granted.)

Hope you understand what I’m going through
Hope you understand when I call out for you
To vent

I remember nearly everything about the sermon.

It was preached on August 14, 2011 at the 11 o’clock service at my church. It was about the Last Supper, which was notable because you don’t often hear a sermon on that and it not be close to Easter. It was a beautiful sermon. One that impacted me. One that I was really excited to tell other people about afterwards.

I remember it, though, because I remember thinking to myself that my pastor seemed to be particularly emotionally motivated by it, and noticeably emotionally drained by it. Continue reading “Motivation of Mercy (Repost)”

For every cheesy pop song ever written that half-hazardly utilizes the word “love”, I’m sure there are three more songs that genuinely come from the heart. Not the heart of culture, where we’re on a constant quest for satisfaction in this form of “love” we’ve created. It comes from the actual heart of the artist, where there is genuine emotion that isn’t always lovely.

Those are the beautiful songs. Not the songs about seeing somebody you’ve never met before and handing them your phone number, but the songs that ask the questions about life that we need to ask. There is beauty in the songs that are sad, because they connect with the parts of our hearts that are sad. Sometimes, it’s the songs that connect to the parts of our hearts that are angry that mean the most to us.

Good songs reflect life. It’s why we have continued to make music over the years. Continue reading “Beautiful Disasters”

“He’d kill then thousand people
With a sleight of his hand
Running far, running fast….”

I don’t really remember much about Luke Woodham. He was 16 years old when I was just 9. He lived just some twenty minutes away from me, in Pearl, Mississippi, but we never would have crossed paths for any reason. As far as I know, we had no mutual friends. I can’t think of a single connection between he and I, yet I will never forget Luke Woodham for the one thing he will be remembered for.

On October 1, 1997, Luke murdered his mother, then went to his high school and opened fire on his ex-girlfriend. He killed two students, injured seven others, but more importantly, sparked a chain of school shootings that the world had never seen. In the ten years following the Pearl High School shooting, events such as the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings grabbed all of our attention like never before.

I’ll never forget Luke Woodham. He reminds me of what I can be capable of.

Continue reading “On My Best Behavior”