He Humbled Himself
Being on tour in Texas was a sweet blessing!
Welcome to Word for the Week, the series in which I:
share my experience of hearing God’s Word in Mass last weekend,
explore what I believe the Lord is calling me to do about that Word, and
ask how this Word might impact your life, as well.
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Last week, on Palm Sunday, I found myself in Texas. It was a tour! An outdoor concert, uninterrupted sleep, meeting with Instagram friends who became real-life friends. Being welcomed simply because I wanted to sing about Jesus. And Mass in a new parish.
The Word that spoke to me, however, escaped me during the week! As I scrolled back through the readings on the USCCB website, this section stood out:
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
-Philippians 2:7-8
Per usual, I asked the Lord, “What do you want me to do about this word?”
Sometimes it takes a whole week for the answer to unfold. Other times, the answer is a wave of gratitude. This time, the response built on the trend that I’ve been feeling over the past couple of weeks:
Don’t schedule more live events.
Specifically, that means no mobilizing people to gather together for my music performance, no initiating retreats, no calling churches to come visit as a guest musician.
The answer felt like an invisible forcefield.
While I don’t even recall which particular verse helped to communicate this message, the invisible forcefield persists. And it’s humbling. It leaves me mournful. At the same time... the Lord also took away the desire to give those types of events right now. My desire to “do music” is still there. But the manner of performing on stage in front of a live audience, that seems neutral to me now.
NEUTRAL!?!?
The kind of focused intensity that I have on stage is different than any situation in my life. How could I not desire to run back to that? A year without a concert was by far the longest stretch that I’d been away from the stage since I was a toddler.
And I believe the Lord is asking me to stay back.
Practically: I’ll still fulfill the outstanding contracts that we entered back in 2019/2020. I’ll still keep playing music and writing new songs. But I, at this point, am not called to initiate those events.
Side note: I’m grinning, because I came to a similar conclusion a number of times before! It was usually a result of feeling overwhelmed and needing a new balance. I’ve looked for other jobs (I almost became a music coordinator at a huge parish in AZ a few years ago, for instance) and yet... That desire to be on stage persisted. This is different. This leaves me at a loss.
There’s a huge open space in my heart now. And the Lord is asking me not to fill it myself. Perhaps it’s time to grieve. It seemed in line with the Paschal Mystery this Holy Week.
The events of Holy Week embody obedience, death, and ultimately, resurrection. How is God calling you to be obedient right now? Is there something in your life that needs to die, in order for something new to rise up? Even as I feel in the middle of a mini “death” right now (the death to my own passion for being on stage), the stirrings of possibility beckon.
The tomb was not occupied long. Good Friday is never the end of the story. Amen.
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