And then I felt the need to explain why it was going so great. But I had no answer.

So I said, “I don’t fully understand it, but I guess I don’t have to understand something to enjoy it.”

Reconcile

Why do we feel the need to reconcile everything? Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we learn to account for every penny, dot every ‘i’, cross every ‘t’, and have a reason for everything that happens.

Everything must happen for a reason. Everything must have an explanation. Everything must be earned, everything we have must be deserved.

Wonder

My son Austin does not know why the coffee grinder makes such an awesomely loud noise. He has no idea what it’s doing. But he loves it. And every morning, when I turn it on, his face breaks into a huge 8-tooth grin.

He also thinks opening and closing doors is awesome.

Have you ever stood next to a huge waterfall? Close enough to feel the mist as the water crashes on the rocks? Me neither. But I have a good imagination.

I imagine the feeling of extreme smallness.  The realization of how powerless I am next to such a force of nature. And then there’s the impossible quantity of water that flows over that waterfall every day.

It just. Keeps. Going. Every day. All day. It never stops. Even though I understand how water gets from there to here, the sheer magnitude and scale of the thing boggles my mind.

So at some point, I just stop trying. I stop trying to figure out how it all keeps working, and I simply stand there like Austin by the coffee grinder, with a big grin on my face.

And on some level, I hear myself say:

“That. Is. Awesome.”

Unfair

Bad things sometimes happen to good people. For reasons we can’t explain. Evil people sometimes prosper. And we can’t explain why they’re not dead.

Sometimes we don’t know the whole story. Sometimes we know just enough to drive ourselves crazy while we try to balance the scale.

We try to explain tragedy, justify blessing, validate increase, and reconcile loss. We just want everything to make sense. But sometimes it doesn’t.

In this life you will see and probably experience suffering. Some of it will be because of decisions you’ve made. But some of it will not be.

You will tire of people trying to explain it, giving reasons. Long after you’ve stopped trying to justify your suffering, people around you will still feel the need to explain it, not for your sake, but for their own.

You’ll also experience blessing. Sometimes as a result of your decisions. Other times, not.

Oh You Shouldn’t Have….

Nobody likes giving a gift to someone who doesn’t know how to receive gratefully. You’re excited because you know it’s something they’ll love.

All you want is to see them enjoy it.

You’re not giving it because they deserve it, you’re not giving it to get something in return.

All you want is to see them enjoy it.

But when you give it to them, they get all weird, acting like they’re ashamed to be getting it, trying to think of something they can give you in return. Trying to figure out why they deserve what you’re giving them.

And all you wanted was to see them enjoy it.

I’m That Guy

So when I find myself trying to explain why the guitar lesson business is thriving, and justify it’s success, I have to ask myself “Am I that guy?”

Am I the guy who can’t enjoy something unless I think I deserve it? Am I that guy who can’t enjoy something unless I completely understand it?

Maybe I need to simply look at it like that waterfall, appreciate it’s awesomeness, stop trying to understand it, and just be willing to say:

“That. Is. Awesome”

If you’ve ever tried to push a car with no driver at the wheel, you already know the problems of being pushed.  There’s a reason that cars are towed from in front, rather than pushed from behind.  But more on that in a minute.

A summary of this post

I spent over 8 years using all my skills to to gain attention and validation for myself as a musician in a band.  This need for validation and attention served as my steering as I was pushed by the need to please people and the drive to accomplish great things.  I couldn’t even see God’s plan for my life because it didn’t involve the things that I thought would bring me the most attention. Once God healed the areas that caused me to be driven, and I learned to follow his leading, I was able to follow him along a path that brought me more fulfillment than I ever experienced while being driven and pushed.

Where He’s Led Me

Over the past 16 months, I’ve been creating blues guitar lessons and posting them on YouTube, and selling them to like-minded guitarists around the world.

As of this writing, these lessons have attracted over 2 million views on YouTube, and draw about 10,000 people a month to my website.  I get emails from people every day that would, and sometimes do, make a grown man shed a tear of joy.  Emails telling me about how someone picked up the guitar after 20 years and is finally playing the way they always wanted, or how a proud dad is watching his 6 year old son learning things he never thought possible.

Most of the skills I needed to accomplish this I had learned long before I ever started to use them this way.

Where I Was Driven

Being driven can make you do some crazy things.  The slightest bit of ’tilt’ in your wheels can cause you to veer off course, at the mercy of whatever drives you.

For the longest time, I thought I was going to be the next Stevie Ray Vaughan.  Not once did I stop to consider why.  I realize today that I had a massive need for validation.  My guitar playing skills were what I felt made me special, and I intended to prove it to the world.

My steering was off.

With such a void in my life, the constant push to please people, and the pressure to accomplish, I was pushed again and again, driven off course by the loneliness that ached at my very core.

I spent 10 years of my life starting bands, playing a few gigs, writing songs about stuff that only mattered to me, and constantly wondering when my ship was going to come in and rescue me from this life of obscurity that I was condemned to with all the ordinary people of the world.  I was destined for greatness, and all my skills were testament to that fact.

I made websites, advertisements, logos.  I converted a spare room or basement in every house I rented into a recording space for my ‘art’.  In 2001 I recorded a CD and played every instrument and sang everything myself.  By the time I had spent $2000 getting it finished, I realized that it sucked and over 900 of them still sit in boxes in my attic.

In 2005 I recorded another live CD of a concert I had been planning for 6 months.  The quality was mediocre at best, yet I sank another $2000 into getting another set of boxes full of CDs for my attic, again.

I prided myself on my songwriting skills.  I wrote complex songs that didn’t groove, and abandoned the music that I really loved. The strangest things is that I was taking songwriting cues from other songwriters who’s music I didn’t even really enjoy.

Being pushed to please people caused me to expend my time and energy on projects that I had not even consulted my wife about.  For many months, I had people coming into our house 2 or 3 times a week to record.  All because I felt a false sense of obligation to people that I loved, a slight misalignment in my steering that allowed me to be driven off the path that God would have had me on.

One day my wife asked me what my 5 year plan was, and I was brought face to face with the reality that I had no vision for my life.  I had no 5 year plan.  I was completely caught up in what I could do right now to make myself known to the world.

When I Stalled

It’s a vast oversimplification to say that I read some books and was fixed, but that’s how it started.  I learned some things about my faith that I hadn’t known before, and before you know it, I stopped caring about getting a record deal or getting famous.  I stopped feeling obligated to please people, or even to participate in most things I was doing.  I just wanted to stop.  So I did for a while.  And it felt good.

But that’s not where it ended.

The Pulling Begins

In October 21, 2007 I put up my first guitar lesson on YouTube, and in less than 4 months I was selling hundreds of lessons a month to people around the world.  I didn’t start with a plan, I had no agenda.  I actually felt like I could barely keep up with the growing success of the lessons.

Slowly I began to see myself being pulled along a path that I had never seen.  I had answered a simple question from God that night when he asked me “Why aren’t you putting guitar lessons on YouTube?”  I wasn’t driven to do it, I just did what I felt he had asked me to do.

As the lessons grew more and more successful, I tried to turn the steering wheel a couple times, but when you’re being pulled by a force stronger than your ability to turn the wheel, the pull straightens out your steering.  His leading kept me from getting bogged down in things that would only take me off course.  The vision of where he was leading me was so compelling that it caused me to stop putting my hands on the wheel and just trust the pull.

It was as if he was in control.

I’m not going to suggest that God is the only source of pulling.  Certainly people who don’t know God are pulled by great dreams of things to come.  But I truly believe that God’s pull is the one that will bring the most fulfillment in any person’s life.

But it’s hard to be led, when you’re still being driven.

It seems to me that in our culture, there’s a widespread trend of buying lots of stuff, as soon as you can, for as cheaply as you can.  This brings me back to the title of this post.  Quick, Quality, Quantity, pick two.

I want it all, and I want it now

You can certainly have high quality stuff, in large quantities, but it won’t be quick.  It will take time until you own it, which of course includes paying off credit cards used to buy it.  Or you can have high quality stuff, right now (quick), but not very much of it.  Or you can have a lot of stuff, right now, but it won’t be very high quality. 

Unfortunately, I think that this is the mentality that stores like Wal-Mart  promote.  Get everything you think you need, right now, for cheap.  But most of it’s really bad quality.  All ethical issues aside, most of what Wal-Mart sells for cheap is cheap for a reason.  It’s made cheaply.

The part of this that causes me major heartburn, is that it sends the message that quality is expendable.  Just ignore quality, focus on how much you can get.  While this is great in the short term, it breaks down in the long term because of more frequent repairs and replacements.

Learning to appreciate less for more

The idea of spending more money to get less stuff is a pretty direct affront to the mentality that most of us hold.  If presented with an empty living room, most of us would choose to fill it up with a sofa, loveseat, and recliner, TV, and entertainment center, with enough money left over to buy a coffee table.

But what if we made the decision that instead of buying all that stuff, we were going to buy just two pieces of furniture that would last for 15 years.  That’s a really hard decision to make when you’ve traditionally placed a high value on quantity over quality.  If we make that decision, we’ll end up with more comfortable furniture and we’ll worry less about spills because the fabric will be stain proof.  The reality is, for most of us, living that way takes longer.  You can’t have the room filled up right away, because you’re valuing quality over both quantity and quick.

Choosing wisely

Knowing that the pendulum swings from one extreme to the other before settling in the middle, I feel that it would be careless not to mention that price does not equal quality.  Many times one is an indicator of the other, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat.  The rule of thumb I use is this.

Buy the highest quality items you can afford to pay for with cash.

That simple rule keeps you focused on quality, as well as financial stewardship, and that can’t be a bad thing.

Square Pegs, Round Holes

Over the past 12 years, I’ve developed some interesting skills.  I developed the strang ability to mimic the guitar style of Stevie Ray Vaughan, arguably the best blues guitarist of all time.  I also taught myself how to build websites in my spare time. Another computer related skill set I’ve also learned is the art of studio recording and video editing.  To top it off, I was surprised to learn that I make a pretty good teacher on subjects I care about.

So here were 4 fairly disjoint skills that I picked up, and for the longest time I felt like I had a bunch of square pegs and my life was made of round holes.  How in the world could all these things fit together?

• Guitar Playing
• Website design skills
• Recording and video editing
• Teaching

Quieting the noise pollution of religion

Over the past year and a half, I’ve dealt with a lot of old testament style beliefs that I held.  Feeling like I had to earn God’s favor, I had to fix everybody, and make them happy.  These kinds of thoughts and beliefs were polluting the air between me and God to the point where I could not hear him.

As I began to walk away from some of those mindsets, I started to experience a kind of peace I had never felt before.  A peace with who I was, who he had made me.  I began to hear him speak about things I would have never considered important enough to him to talk about.  I began to trust that there really was nothing that he considered insignificant.

The blinders come off

For years I had dreamed of putting together a curriculum to share what I had learned on guitar.  But the task of creating a series of DVDs seemed so monumental I always wondered if I’d ever get the chance to do it.  One night while I was cruising around YouTube, watching videos of other people playing guitar, showing off their amps, pedals, guitars, or just showing off their skills, an idea came from that still small voice that I’ve learned is the Holy Spirit.

"Why don’t you start making your own video guitar lessons, and build a website to show them on?"

And my immediate response was "uh…….yeah.  Why haven’t I?"  It was so simple, it was right there in front of me, and it had never occured to me that I could do it.

To make a short story even shorter, in the 3 months since I put up my first lesson, I’ve had my first 22 lessons watched over 60,000 times on YouTube, I’ve had over 3,000 individual people from over 20 countries visit my website.  The number of pages viewed on my website is more than 30,000.  I now get about 1100 pages viewed a day on my site and over 1000 video views a day on YouTube.  I’ve had people send me donations, ask me to sell DVD lessons.  I’ve even had people go out and buy amps, guitars, and guitar effects pedals after watching my videos.

All of this was a complete surprise to me.  I have no idea how far this will go, but my bigger question was "Why didn’t I think of this before?".  The skills were there, but I couldn’t see it.  I was so wrapped up in trying to please God, that I couldn’t see the most obvious thing right in front of my eyes.  The one thing that pulls together all my skills towards a common goal.  It makes so much sense now looking back, but for years it was hidden in plain sight.

You can’t afford not to hear God

To close this series, I want to say again that a Christian cannot afford to go through life not hearing God.  We will miss many good things that he’s laid before us, uniquely designed for the skills he’s given us.  While we’re stuck running in circles trying to figure out how to get our act together enough to please him, we will miss the ideas that he’s hidden in plain sight, right in front of our eyes.

The things you own end up owning you.

It sounds absurd, but in the end, I believe it’s true. And here’s why. The things you own need to be cared for if you want to enjoy them. The more things you own, the more things you have to take care of. The more things you have to take care of, the less time you have to enjoy them. Eventually you get to the point where you’re not using certain things, but you still have to take care of them. At that point, that thing owns you. It is happy to sit there and rust, but if you let it do that, you’re the one who has to look at it, think of the money you wasted, feel guilty about not caring for it. It owns you. (And let’s not even talk about the stress that comes from worrying about something happening to those precious toys.)

Take my pool for instance. I love the idea of having a pool. I used to imagine myself coming home every day and going for a swim. The problem is reality. In reality, leaves fall in my pool every day. So do frogs, and sometimes birds. They often die in there. So my vision of jumping in the pool right after coming home from work is postponed by at least 20 minutes of work cleaning up the pool every time I want to use it. It will sit there and collect leaves and dumb thirsty animals whether I take care of it or not. Whether I ever take a swim, it will still run out of chemicals and turn green. I must take care of it if I even want the possibility of using it. It owns me.

I also have a really nice miter saw. I don’t use it. So I put it in my shed. Now it’s starting to corrode. Sure it doesn’t take much maintenance to keep it inside, but it takes up space. Precious space. If I didn’t own it, not only would I get more space in my laundry room, but I’d have one less thing to worry about taking care of.

There’s something to be said for things that you get to use, but not own. Chances are, if you have to leave your house to go use something, you won’t need to do anything to it before you use it. And when you’re done, you just go home. Someone else cleans it, someone else takes care of it, and you can get back to doing whatever else it is that you really care about.

I think I’m approaching a point in life where I want to own the fewest amount of things that take the least amount of maintanance.