Captain’s Log – Star Date: 12006.16 – One More Step

A friend shared the clip below with me this morning from the movie Facing The Giants. I’ve watched this movie a few times. If you’re into sports and specifically football it’s a great story but even if you’re not a sports person, this movie is worthy of your time. Give it a watch…

https://youtu.be/-sUKoKQlEC4 Facing The Giants – Death Crawl

As I watched this clip again, I was drawn into the words the coach kept using to encourage his player to keep going. No matter that the player couldn’t see how far he still had to go, those encouraging and yes difficult words, kept pulling him forward. Carrying the load he was bearing much farther than he thought he could. To not give up but keep pushing on even though it hurt. No matter how much it hurt.

That’s how it is for you and I. The load we carry are sometimes so heavy. We might not even know why we are carrying it. We ask why me? Why is this happening to me?

Maybe we feel we can carry it for a short while, a distance that seems sufficient to us. But when that load stays on us longer than we expected, we grow so tired of it. So weary. To take another step while still carrying our load is impossible. It’s too hard. We want to give up.

But we too have a coach that is on our side. Giving us words of encouragement. Supporting us by guiding us in which way we should turn. The words of our coach are hard to hear and many times difficult to follow. But his words are always what’s best for us. If we trust in his words and fully believe that he is for us, not against us, we can reach our goals. Even go farther than we thought we could with our burden.

And we find out we can actually carry that burden and more if we have faith in our coach and believe in his words.

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭8:37‬

Who’s your coach? Are you listening to his words? Do you believe him when he says you can do it and he’ll be right there with you the entire way? I do because the only way I’ve been able to carry my heaviest burdens is by trusting in my coach and his words.

What burdens do you carry? What goal seems too hard to reach? As we all continue to carry our loads, our burdens, let’s remember to keep listening to our coach. Let’s allow his words of encouragement to envelope us, to strengthen us, to guide as we crawl our way through life.

In the end we’ll see that our coach was right. We could and can do it. And we were even able to carry 20 lbs more than we thought we could.

Keep crawling and carry on.

See you down the road….

Advertisement

Every New Beginning…

If you’ve been reading my posts for a while now, you may have picked up on the fact that music has played a major role in defining who I am. Music has brought me to my faith, lifted me up when I’ve been down, and moved me to tears more times than I can count. Both happy and sad tears.

Since my childhood, listening to Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and other early rockers on my record player, through my teenager 8-track tape years listening and cruising to Boston, Foreigner, Foghat, and the J Geils Band, through the many genres and decades leading up to today, music has always brought meaning and emotion into my life. It’s sorta in my soul I think.

Bob Seger was one of my favorite singers in the 70s and 80s. I bet you can hear one of his songs in your head right now. Old Time Rock and Roll, Night Moves, Still the Same, Against the Wind. The rhythms and lyrics of many of these songs have stuck with me over the years and I find myself going back to them at different times to help me get through things going on in my life. I wonder which artists and songs have stayed with you over the years. Which have carried you through?

One Seger song that I’ve always loved and yet haunts me is Turn the Page. If you’re familiar with it, you know it’s about a singer on the road playing in different cities night after night. It’s about the grind and toll it is taking on him and how he wishes the trip was through. It’s about encounters with people in places he doesn’t know or even want to be with. It’s about the empty feeling he has in his soul.

I do like to sing but I’ve never been on tour so I can’t personally relate to what Bob Seger was specifically singing about in Turn the Page. But I can understand and relate to the empty feeling caused by what he was experiencing. There have been many times in my almost 60 years, that life events have made me feel exhausted. Burned out. Wanting to just give up. And a few times I have. I just couldn’t turn the page in my life to see what was next and frankly didn’t really care. I had had enough. Have you been there?

In 1998, the song Closing Time by Semisonic came out. At first, I didn’t really like the song much. I mean come on, it was about a guy at a bar hoping a certain someone would take him home after the bar closed. Maybe it brought back memories of some closing times at Mickey’s in my home town back in the 80s. Might have hit a little too close to home for me but that’s another story for another time. Maybe over a beer. You can buy.

But in the song Closing Time, there is one line that over the past 20 years seems to always come back to my mind. And during the last two years, it has come to mind many times when I’ve been really struggling with turning the page to the next chapter in my life. And I have found encouragement in the words.

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

Pretty simple right but oh so hard to think of when you’re in crisis, or grieving, or just worn out. If we allowed every page in our lives to just go on and on, nothing would ever change. We’d be stuck on the road night after night, perhaps playing star over and over again just like Seger.

Thankfully, I’ve come to understand a new beginning is only possible if we move on or close out the current page we’re living in and release the empty and scared feelings to allow our lives to begin again. Ain’t easy to do but I’ve found I can.

Which page are you on right now? Are you at the end of a chapter in your life and finding it really difficult to turn the page to something new? I want to encourage you to keep going, close out the page your on now, and turn to that new beginning that’s waiting for you. You can do it. Put on an old song that lifts you up and move on. It’s closing time. The rest is still unwritten.

Oh wait, that’s another song. Perhaps for another time.

See you down the road….