Cry Me A River

I haven't been writing as much because I feel stuck right now.  Like Mr. Burns in The Simpson's I have the writers "Three Stooges Syndrome."  This is a stretch because how can you call yourself a "writer" after six blog posts, but I find that I have so much to write about that I am having a hard time selecting what I am going to write about next.  This time I want to talk about one of my favorite songs, but first let's talk about the artist a little bit.

I am a 35 year old man and I enjoy Justin Timberlake.  That felt good.  I feel like I am at a meeting of JT Anonymous.  Justin Timberlake is just like Justin Bieber only if Bieber could sing and had personality.  JT has killed me on Saturday Night Live.  He has moved into movies and has a couple coming out soon.  He can sing and dance.  He reminds me of Michael Jackson without the weirdness and Bubbles the Monkey.  He has dated multiple celebrities, and has become a sex symbol in his own right (this is not why I am a fan...please follow my thinking for a minute).

So what song is it that I love?  It's Cry Me A River.  Fewer songs have ever been better constructed.  I am not a big fan of falsetto, but it works very well in this song.  So many things are going on in this song that you listen to it and you pick up a new beat, sound, or vocal inflection each time.  Many people know what the song is actually about, but I will recap:

- Boy Meet Girl
- Boy Dates Girl
- Boy Loves Girl
- Girl Cheats on Boy (Allegedly)
- Boy Records One of the Greatest "Oh Yeah" Songs Ever
- Girl's Name is Brittney Spears

Simple huh?  It does make me think what would have been if he had never been cheated on.  Would he have bounced from woman to woman?  Would he release music that was as sexually charged?  Would he actually bring the "sexyback?"  Would I have been able to make that lame joke?

Bringing this home, are we able to come back from events that happen to us in our own lives?  Many of us allow a single event to define our life in perpetuity.  Whether it is abuse, rejection, death, or failure we wear our past like death shrouds.  My Mom told me about how elephants are staked at an early age.  The elephant will stay in that one place staked to the Earth even when the elephant is full size and can, with little effort, dislodge the stake.  People that lived during The Great Depression would save money and live extraordinarily frugal (not that frugality is bad) even when they could afford basic things to increase their quality of life because they lived with the fear of poverty.

Christianity doesn't protect us from the crummy things people do.  Christianity "merely" gives us the hope to know there is One that will deliver us from the hurts that are inflicted on us.  The choice is yours though.  Do you want to walk around wounded so everyone can be mesmerized by the figurative "Purple Heart" you wear, or do you want to show yourself as a recipient of a grace transfusion?  Our hurts only bring God glory when we can move past the hurt and into a place where we can use our pain for ministry.