I am not exactly having a mid-life crisis…at least I hope not. But there is a part of me that has been struggling for a while now with the reality that my days are pretty much routine, ordinary, and (dare I say it) sometimes boring. There’s not traveling the globe, no late night rock concerts three states away, no staying up to four in the morning drinking coffee at Denny’s, and no pulling stupid stunts just for the thrill of it. Those days are behind me.
It’s easy for me to look back on “young David” with a bit of jealousy. After all I am not going to Germany, Paris, or even Chicago this weekend. No, there are bills that must be paid, diapers that must be changed, and contracts that must be honored. Worst of all I think my grass needs cut one more time this year. I hate feeling this way, as if the banality of my life has sucked “the life” right out of me. But it’s really all about perspective, and often I need some fresh perspective to reorient my thinking. Andrew Peterson has offered me some of that lately through his music.
For Peterson the great adventures really begin in the mundane. In World Traveler he sings about his longing to see “the world that God had made,” but before he had really seen anything he “gave that girl that golden ring,” and it was at that moment, he says that he “became a world traveler.” “I walked the hills of the human soul of a tender girl,” he sings. In a beautiful picture he describes watching his children sleep in their rooms and says under this roof he is a world traveler. He says:
I’m a world traveler into these uncharted lands, to blaze a vast expanse of the heart and soul.
Parenting seems like a wild adventure to Peterson.
To many of us this seems like a silly suggestion. After all who in the right mind views domesticity as some great adventure? But Peterson calls it a “battle.” And he compares marriage to dancing in a minefield (Dancing in the Minefields). It’s a compelling image, one of both beauty and grace, and of danger and excitement. He sings in the chorus:
We went dancing in the minefields
We went sailing in the storm
And it was harder than we dreamed
But I believe that’s what the promise is for
Marriage is this wild adventure to Peterson. It’s sailing in a storm. It’s dangerous and scary and chaotic. But “in the face of all this chaos, baby I can dance with you.” There’s something quite refreshing about this perspective.
Much of our contemporary culture views marriage and parenting as mundane, boring, and as the settling into a meaningless existence. Much of our culture views it as the surrender of fun, adventure, and of “life” in general. But not Peterson! The adventure, according to him, begins anew at that moment and carries on for life.
“Love” he says is itself its own unique adventure. He sings in a somewhat contrary way about the subject, saying:
Love is a good thing, it’ll fall like rain on your parade. Laugh at the plans that you tried to make. It’ll wear you down ’till your heart just break, and it’s a good thing. Love is a good thing. (Love is a Good Thing)
That’s not what we expect to hear. We all know that songs that declare “love stinks,” “love hurts,” etc. And of course it’s true on some level, but here Peterson sings about that heart-break, and calls it a “good thing.” He says it can “hurt like a blast from a hand grenade,” adding that “there in the middle of the mess it made you’ll find a good thing.” Who sings like this? Who believes this?
Love is either hard or its wonderful, there’s no mixing of these things in the popular mind. It’s one or the other. But that, I think is what makes “love” and even domesticity the great adventure. It is both. It’s hard and wonderful. It’s dancing in a minefield, it’s walking through “canyon flames, deep as an ocean and hot as a thousand suns” (Don’t Give Up On Me). But it’s also a “golden dream: angel voices in the rooms where the children run, all covered in light.” This is not the home life of the average family, it’s the home life of someone who looks at his world with fresh perspective, with right perspective, with godly perspective. And for Peterson it is God who makes all the difference.
For Peterson this life is all by God’s grand design, it is he who gives unique meaning to what we consider the banal. He sings:
Well, could it be that the many roads you took to get here were just for me to tell this story and for you to hear this song? And your many hopes and fears were meant to bring you here all along. (Many Roads)
What makes this life the adventure is that God is involved in it too. Marriage is no great adventure when at the first sign of trouble you can bail, when you have the constant pressing fear that this isn’t worth it, isn’t working out. But for Peterson there is a hope that transforms the banal into the wild adventure. He writes:
‘Cause we bear the light of the Son of Man
So there’s nothing left to fear
So I’ll walk with you in the shadowlands
Till the shadows disappear‘Cause he promised not to leave us
And his promises are true
So in the face of all this chaos, baby,
I can dance with you(Dancing in the Minefields)
The plan may not have been any one’s plan. No one necessarily plans to trade in “my mustang for a minivan” (Family Man). But in the family “Everything I had to lose came back a thousand times in you.” “This was not my plan, it’s so much better than.”
Of course there will always be those who deny it, who don’t understand it, who can’t see it. But I think this fresh perspective is just what I needed, and maybe what you needed to. The adventure is not over, the banal adventure is a better, more wild, more wonderful adventure than any other could be. For that I am thankful to my wife and kids. For that I am thankful to my God.
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 