Avenue

Source: http://6lyrics.com/

Ladies and gentlemen, tenth avenue north.

This band has been inspiring me for twelve hours or less, but let me just tell you that I love these guys not because they're hot, great guitarists, or musical geniuses. I love them because they love Jesus and their songs of worship are amazing.

And when I say amazing, I mean really amazing.

No, I'm not fangirling. I'm God-girling. Have you heard of that song by Jamie Grace? Another inspiration she is. I shall blog about her later. Anyway, it's not one of those fan-ships wherein I ask them to marry me in nothing but a towel (idea c/o Harry Potter fangirl, circa 2003). They're in this blog because we both share a love - Jesus.

And I'm just amazed that a band of not-so-bad-looking guys with great voices and musical abilities chose Christian Contemporary Music as a genre to master their craft in.

I've been listening to their songs for the past few hours, and man, they do not know how they can change lives. You are More, By Your Side, Beloved, Let it Go AND MANY OTHERS have been great inspirations in my soul-searching, or rather Christ-searching. Unlike other bands, they don't tell you that we love music so much and we'll be happy to date fans. They tell you that we love Jesus so much and we'll be happy to share His love with you. Jesus lives in them and in their music.

What made me more drawn to them is their journal on their website. This may seem to be ultimate fangirling, but I shall give you the link: http://www.tenthavenuenorth.com/journal I can't believe that they wrote the entries there, especially the ones by Mike Donehey, their vocalist. Seriously, he's one of the people I now put in my mental shelf of: People who are instruments of God's Grace. Might be a weird name for a mental shelf. Well, that's because not a lot of people are part of it, and it's not that easy to get to it. I mean, even though everyone is an instrument of God's grace, there are just some people that make you believe even more in Him and love Him more. And Mike Donehey, along with a few others are just evidences of the existence of such people.

Let me just share with you a part of a journal entry written by him on their song entitled Satisfy:

Have you ever read the story in Genesis about Jacob and his two wives? It’s quite depressing and wonderfully relevant to what we’re thinking about here. If you haven’t read it, basically, this kid named Jacob is in trouble with his brother and father, so he runs away to his Uncle Laban. And when he gets there he falls in love with Laban’s daughter Rachel. So much so, that he makes this ridiculous offer of working seven years for her hand in marriage. Well, Laban recognizes right away that Jacob has a serious love infatuation and decides to cash in. Laban has another daughter named Leah, who’s “weak in the eyes,” which is a nice Biblical way of saying, “She was uuuugggglllllyyy!”  And so, when the time comes for Jacob to marry Rachel, Laban, knowing he’s gonna have a hard time getting a guy to buy Leah off his hands,  gives Jacob Leah instead.  And I guess there must have been a lot of veils and wine involved,  because the text says it wasn’t til the next morning that Jacob wakes up and “Behold! It was Leah!” Yeah, that’s disturbing huh? I mean, how did he not know that it was Leah? Well, we’re not exactly told, but we are shown something terribly intriguing. Later on in the story, Jacob ends up marrying Rachel too, and you see all sorts of pandemonium break loose. Jacob loves Rachel more than Leah, and so Leah starts naming her children things like, “Now my husband will see me” and crazy stuff like that. But you also see Rachel jealous of Leah because Leah can have kids and she can’t. So Rachel is giving her hand maid to Jacob to sleep with. You also see Laban running after Jacob because he wants to keep getting money from him, etc etc etc. Let’s just say, their family would make quite an entertaining Jerry Springer show.  But here’s the deal. That phrase, that one single phrase,  when Jacob wakes up after marrying the wrong sister, says so much. “And behold, it was Leah.”

You see, that isn’t just for Jacob, it’s for us. This is the disillusionment that we all live in. How could Jacob not know it was Leah? Because he was blind.  Blind by what? Desire.  Hmmmm.  Sound like anyone you know? It sounds impossible that Jacob could not have known who he was marrying, but isn’t the same for us? We think this one person, this one thing, this one job,  this one house or car or cell phone or whatever is going to finally do it.  This will satisfy. And so we spend all our money on buying, wooing, and getting that one thing we have our heart set on, and when we finally win them or buy them or whatever; what happens? “And behold it was Leah.”  I’ve always loved this David Wilcox song called, “Break in the Cup.” In the song he likens all of us to cups with cracks. Yeah yeah, ha ha, we all have cracks.  I can almost hear the middle schoolers snickering in the back. In any case, he says that we all have a crack in the cup that holds love inside us, and no matter how much we try to get other people to fill us, the crack in our cup lets the love run out. I suppose we could call the crack sin, and the cup is our heart. Well, in the bridge, after trying desperately to get his cup filled and coming up empty he sings, “we cannot trade empty for empty, we must go to the waterfall, for there’s a break in the cup that holds love, inside us all.”  Did you catch that? “We must go to the waterfall.” Sometimes, our relationships with other people are so miserable because we think they’re on this earth to make us happy.  They need to fill our cup and make us feel complete, and when they can’t, we get angry. We get upset.

You see? Read the rest of the entry and the wonderful comments by other faith-sharers here.

Not to ridicule or anything, but I actually laughed so hard when he threw back the "Behold, it was Leah" line in the second paragraph. A part of it was because of my Star Wars fandom (I know, the spelling's different... but what the hey, in my mind, it was playing with the resonant Darth Vader voice), but most of it was because I actually can relate to it. And up to now, it still is funny to me, because that's exactly how I felt when I was starting to expect more than what she can give. "Behold, it was Leah." Nay, I don't think I could take that line out of my mind for a few more days.

But do you see what I actually liked about Mike Donehey's writing? It's not particularly didactic, but it teaches us a lesson by telling us that he is part of us. He uses we, not you. He isn't trying to tell us "I, right, you, wrong." He uses modern language, biblical allusions, and contemporary works to highlight his points. Brilliant. I might actually be compelled to tell him to write a book once they're done with their songs (please don't let this happen soon, though. The world needs more musicians like them.) He introduces concepts using the most trivial and sometimes grandest metaphors and analogies like the ice cream and the waterfalls. I also like the way he utilizes humor into what keeps us reading, instead of digressing from his points. Before I even decide to write an essay of my literary criticism of the article, I'll just try to control myself and say that I learned so much from him and I like his writing style.

And because I think my blog post on this band got longer than I expected it to be, let me just cap this post off with a song by them that is bound to keep you wanting more of tenth avenue north and more of Jesus.

"Sing to the LORD, all the earth;

proclaim the good news of His salvation from day to day."

1 Chronicles 16:23 (NKJV)