AtlantaFest in Brief Recap Form

Bands Seen:

Superchick

Manic Drive

Remedy Drive

Downhere

The Museum

Living Anthem

Fireflight

Skillet

Echoing Angels

Chasen

Sanctus Real

Seventh Day Slumber

Kids in the Way

Disciple

Family Force 5

Jason Gray

Reilly

House of Heroes

Addison Road

Britt Nicole

Tenth Avenue North

Canton Jones

RED

Jeff Chandler

Newsboys

(Total: 25)

Speakers:

Nick Vujicic

Tom Coverly

Joseph Rojas

Matt Pitt

Total number of pictures taken:
1,082

Total number of videos taken:

40

Total number of caffeinated drinks consumed in 3 days:

...let's not talk about that

Total number of showers in 3 days:

5

Most sleep I ever got:

6 hours on Friday night

Bands I met:

Manic Drive

Chasen

Disciple

Family Force 5

House of Heroes

Longest straight session of constant bands/speakers:

13 hours

Weirdest meal experience:

Eating cold beef stew out of tin cans while sitting against the barrier in the mosh pit

Most unexpectedly awesome artist:

Canton Jones

Most beautiful personal moment:

...I would have to list at least 5.

Most beautiful overall moment:

Watching dozens of people of all ages come to the front to accept Jesus on their knees just as it started raining

There will be more on this after I get home and get some sleep and spend a few days rehydrating, I assure you. There's a lot to process right now.

- Elraen -

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Last year in June I did a "one year later" reflection on the 2008 moot. It's been close to two years now, and I'll be gone when we hit exactly two years, so I won't be able to blog. But today I have been looking over the past two moots-- more specifically the 2009 moot, and remembering. And so you get my thoughts, because they are too heavy to hold by myself.

When I look at the two annual gatherings of my online writer's group that I've attended, it's hard to believe they were the same basic thing. They both taught me, but in different ways. The first one, in 2008, taught me through facing fears and standing strong even when I was terribly alone (see my post last year). It taught me more about reaching out even when it was hard, and it taught me so much about unconditional love. As I get farther from it and grow up, the parts of the experience that once made me bitter have softened, and the beautiful parts have grown in me.

The 2009 moot was totally different. It taught me probably more than the 2008 moot did, but it taught me through joy. Well, there was the first day (or rather night)... by the end of that I was sure that the whole thing was going to be one big disaster. But before long I was deep in experiences I had never known before. There is no way that I could possibly overstate the importance of the 2009 moot in my life. The best way I can explain it now, 10 months down the road, is that I found joy there. I can only remember experiencing joy twice in my life before that week. And I know I say that at the risk of sounding emo and very much a teenager, but honestly, I never understood joy even as a child. I saw it for the first time the summer I was 16, and then the second time at a Skillet show in April 2009. But it was never a consistent factor in my life until after that week spent in the mountains with dear friends in August of 2009. Now it's something that I find in the most simple and quiet moments, as well as in the bright and shining days where I am given things that are new and beautiful. A cup of coffee on a cold afternoon, battered converse shoes, siblings' smiles, city lights at night, clouds on wind-swept afternoons... there is so much joy in this world, coursing beneath the surface, like a liquid fire that burns clean and clear. I just didn't see it in the first 18 years of my life.

There has been a problem with all of this though. I had these experiences, I was changed by them, I had my best semester at school yet last Fall purely because I was still living with the joy I had found... and then things changed. The past six months have felt like one nightmare after another... stupid decisions I made in relationships finally catching up to me, family members getting cancer, family members dying, financial problems, academic stress, constant illness, family stress, friendships broken, responsibilities that have been failed. And in the face of that, I have managed an odd maneuver-- I have convinced myself that the 2009 moot never happened.

I don't mean literally. I obviously know I was there. But I have forced the details and the joy into obscurity, and I am forgetting more and more of it. In the beginning, this scared me and I would ask people to tell me I'd been there, to tell me what I'd said and what I'd done at the moot. And then I just stopped caring. I won't look at the pictures, I won't watch the videos, I won't listen to songs that remind me of it.

And I still am not sure why I did this. I think part of it is that I just can't believe anymore that something that good actually happened. But I think a bigger part is that I do not want to be reminded, because if what God showed me there was true, then I have no choice but to hope and to hold onto the belief that friendships can actually heal instead of hurt. And that is hard, because it means abandoning selfish hurts and self-pity and fear.

If I am to be perfectly blunt, I don't want to go to the moot again this year. I never want to go (though I never regret it), but this year I have better reasons than usual. So I had almost made up my mind not to go, and I was going to try to talk it over with one of our mentors to explain my reasons for not wanting to go, when God suddenly told me very clearly that I needed to. It made me angry and upset at first ("God wants me to be happy? How dare He!" ...No, I'm not always logical). And now I am just either indifferent or afraid...

I think it's partly because I honestly don't enjoy being around people right now, for the most part. I try over and over again to make the best of it, to be who people expect, to smile and to actually enjoy time with friends... but I can't. I don't know why, aside from the fact that I have been more embittered by friendships in the past few months than ever before. And I have a really hard time missing people right now too. I know I should miss people, and I can keep telling myself that, but it doesn't help. It's not that I don't love my friends-- I do. I love them more than words can express. So why do I find it so hard to want to be with them? It's definitely not anything wrong with them...

The bravest thing I have is hope. That quote always comes back to me. And it's what I'm trying so hard to hold to now. Today I have been making myself go back and watch moot videos, to read my incredibly lengthy journal, to remember that last time God worked things out greater than I could imagine. And for the past few weeks He has given me moments of encouragement too, beautiful moments where for just a while I remember what it is to have normal friendships... a night going to coffee with a friend who I see much too rarely, playing games with people I didn't realize I could relate to before, friends unexpectedly dropping by. It's in those moments that I remember the sense of safety and community and joy that I found last August... and I believe that the God who sung away the night then could and will do so again. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever...

The worst mistake I could make would be to believe that because it is storming now it always will be.

It's a steady process, trying to come back to the things you believe in after you drop them for a while... love, hope, trust. And so I will remember the light of yesterday and look forward to the hope of tomorrow, resting on His love today...

- Elraen -

The great contrast is where the beauty is. The sunshine must meet the rain to paint our skies with rainbows. It is at that meeting where our worlds become the most alive. The clouds of numb despair and the warm sunlight of love and hope meet, as they always must, to prove in the end how glorious and beautiful the light of the love is. The contrast is real, and in it I am alive. And I am laughing.
- The final words in my 2009 Moot Journal

Therapy

It's been over a month since I wrote anything here, and something in me rebels against the idea of the month of May going by without a single post. Life has been hard lately, and that has made it difficult for me to find words to say.

About half-way through the Fall semester of 2009, Relient K released a new album, Forget and Not Slow Down. There is a track on that album that quickly became my favorite, and that also became the theme song of my sophomore year. The song is called Therapy. Matt Thiessen wrote it while staying alone in an isolated cabin after his girlfriend (and fiance) of four years left him. He did nothing but think and write songs for weeks, and Therapy is a reflection of that.

I never thought I'd need all this time alone, it goes to show:
I had so much, yet I had need for nothing but You.

This is just therapy, let's call it what it is (not what we were)
With a death-grip on this life always transitioning.
This is just therapy, 'cause you won't take my calls

and that makes God the only one who's left here listening to me.

Letting it all sink in, it's good to feel a sting now and again.
I hope its one less woeful thing there is to fight through.
Forgetting it all begin, fresh paper and nice expensive pen.
The past can not subtract a thing from what I might do for You--
unless that's what I let it do.

All that is a necessary backdrop for what I want to say.

I think I often get this idea in my head that there are things God has to use to speak to me, to make me feel better, to heal me. When I am sad I think I need music or a concert. When I am lonely I think I need my close friends. I often sit here thinking "if only I could talk to ____, I would feel better."

I have had to question that purely through the circumstances of life. I can think to myself that I want close friends here, but the bottom line is, all my close friends live all over the United States. I have only had one face-to-face relationship where I actually trusted the person in the past 5 years, and that relationship changed radically a few years ago so it's not even the same anymore. And so there is this disconnect in my head-- I keep telling myself I need something that is eternally denied, save for a few days here and there. Circumstances are such that even the people I do feel safe with on some level are busy (as am I), and I usually only get to talk to them once every several weeks (if I am lucky). I also have a strong tendency to lose close relationships, or at least to lose the closeness that was once there. "I never told you then that I'd be easy to love..."

And there is a theme of loss that runs deep through the life of every human being, always tearing beneath the surface, breaking through our windows in the night and stealing away things we thought were stable. We question the right of the thief to steal from us, ask God why He didn't shield us (because we know He could).

I think that sometimes the terrible loss and loneliness are allowed to hold sway because they take away the false sense of security that claims that God somehow needs to follow our expectations in order to rescue us (or, worse yet, the lie that would claim that He doesn't need to rescue us at all). Does God really need a certain set of people or a certain event to rescue His children? No. He certainly can use familiar ways to heal us-- He often does, maybe in part because sometimes we refuse to open our hearts to Him except when we see Him moving through things He's used before. But He is not limited. My God would not be any less powerful or any less good or any less able to save me if every song on earth faded to silence and every person on earth who loved me turned away in scorn.

And sometimes there have to be the moments when everything falls apart in order to realize that the hope we thought we lost has actually been running beneath the surface, waiting to catch us, all along... God's voice is clearly heard when it is the only voice left. And His hope is a place I am running to, because I realize that it is the only way for me to see beyond the circumstances of my own failure and my own flawed expectation and my own foolish moments of despair.

My grandfather is dying of cancer right now. My great grandfather is also dying. My family just lost the part-time job we've been doing for years, and thus a very vital 25% of our income. At least 75% of my few friends at school just graduated and/or got married and left. Relationships that were stable are now seriously in question. There are moments when I feel I have nothing left. And those are moments that force me to cling to the Everything who I have been refusing to surrender to.

All that said, I think once that foundation is in place again-- the foundation of pure, unmerited, unconditional Love-- it is then that to grow we must reach. I naturally love solitude-- I love to be alone. I even love the pain of loneliness, because it is so very familiar and safe. But when I face God's unbroken grace, I can't seem to make myself believe anymore that I am meant to simply absorb it. I am to soak it in and let light pour like liquid from all the places I have been broken.

I have been in a time of silence for a long time now, a time when loss hits hard, over and over again. Maybe this blog is more a reminder to myself than anything else-- a shove towards the reality of hope found in the wreckage. Because it is only then that there can be such a thing as healthy relationships, as meaningful experiences...

This word and concept that our modern world is addicted to, "community..." I think it is really the idea of broken people living for love. And if I am to live for love, then first I have to believe it exists... and so first I have to find the definition of love, the Love that reached down in a perfect act of surrender and sacrifice. What great loss that was. My own losses grow pale and hollow in comparison.

Loneliness and solitude are two things not to get confused,

because I spend my solitude with You.

There will be the empty moments and the lonely moments to drive me back to His hope, and it is hope in turn that will be my strength to love and to breathe in life. That is the only system, the only therapy, that will ever work: complete trust in and reliance on His love. Even if that means losing everything in order to see Him clearly.

He is worth it.

- Elraen -

"Thank God for disaster-- disaster and tears. Thank God for my reasons, my reasons to fear. Every time that I've lost it all and death is calling me, I understand this is what saved my life again. Wake up." [Since October]

Butterfly Hope

When I was 15 and 16 years old, I didn't understand much about God, but I knew that I wanted to know for certain that He was real and that He loved me. So sometimes I would ask Him to give me something to assure me that He was real and that He cared.

And He started sending me butterflies-- which was exciting to me at the time, because I had specifically asked Him to send my butterflies. I remember the first time very well. I was working, and I remember praying God, if You're there, touch me-- send me a butterfly. I opened a door. A butterfly was sitting on the ground right in front of the door, gently fluttering its brown-orange wings as it rested.

This happened twice more, and each time was a little bit more meaningful. It was never in the same place, in fact once it was in a different state, but every time the butterfly looked exactly the same, and every time the butterfly left without me having any concept of where it had gone. They didn't fly away. They just were not anymore.

The last time it happened was in late June, the summer I was 16, and it was notable because that time I didn't ask God for it. I was on a walk. It was the first time I'd left the safety of my immediate surroundings in days, and because of that I felt vulnerable. I was waiting for my younger sister and a friend to catch up with me, and I was standing beneath some thick trees, because Texas summers are warm. Inside, I was in a place that seemed too dark to escape from. I felt locked in a cage, trapped in lines that seemed much too solid to ever be erased. I hadn't been sleeping or eating, and so my world was a gray blur.

A butterfly landed on a tree directly in front of me, a bit of orange against the green and the brown. I saw it, and understood what it meant, because I'd seen it before. It was God whispering I'm right here. Hold on.

It was the next day that I accepted that Jesus loved me for the first time.

Nearly three years have gone by, and I have never again seen a butterfly that looked quite like the ones I saw back then. But lately it has been on my mind a lot.

I think I have a twisted idea of hope sometimes. I often view it as being about happiness, or about looking forward to some event that I know for certain will happen. I think of it as some consistent, driving force that should make me forever smile and say "it will be OK." I've had that idea somewhat challenged over the past few months.

There's an interesting bit in Romans 5. I wrote a 13-page paper on the first 11 verses of this chapter when I was a freshman, but I missed this. Paul writes but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

What I find interesting is that hope isn't immediate. It's not "when you suffer you will still hope," or even "once you suffer you will learn hope." This may not be very scholarly, but I think there's a reason Paul wrote it this way. Sometimes we have to persevere before we find hope. There is something about holding on without hope that produces a character in us that can hope.

I couldn't hope, when I was 16. I had no concept of what it would be like to hold onto the idea that God is a constant in a world where pain is ultimately just a temporary curtain of rain. I couldn't believe that there was certainty that tomorrow would not always be like today. And so God sent me butterflies, even though He didn't have to. He sent me whispers-- hold on. Just a little longer. And a joy I had never imagined and could never have deserved came and took hold of my life.

Because ultimately, the only hope that rings true is hope in the Lord-- hope in His love, in His ability to rescue, in the idea that He is faithful and thus will bring sunrises after every night. Hope in His promise of redemption and resurrection. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit...

I don't know if all of this really makes sense. Towards the end of the semester, everything feels disjointed, chaos spilled onto pages. But maybe all I'm really trying to say is this: don't be afraid to hope in God's love, because it won't let you down. And for the moments you aren't brave enough to hope, hold on. Hope will come, even if you can't believe it yet.

"Idea of hope, I believe in you. I need it now: God, I need You."
- The Rocket Summer

Right now I don't know much about tomorrow, but for the first time in a long time I am daring to believe that it will be better than today. And even for the times I can't believe that, still I will cling to the butterflies as they whisper...

Don't give up.

- Elraen, Wandering Star-

Blue: A Poem

Blue
4-12-10

She'd be nothing but a pale page
without the blue songs.
The notes pulse through trembling veins,
running to overflow from bright eyes.
These liquid streaks are not skin, but skeleton,
supporting the hands lifted high.
Found in the silence and the song,
she lives and she dies with abandon.
To come too close is to be drenched in words
bleeding from her eyes, a stain
too deep to erase.
Watch her sing from a distance,
her cold eyes open,
a pale flame behind glass.

The Beauty of Grace...

It has been a long, long while since I wrote a new piece for this blog-- I technically have not since February. It's time for some new words.

As many of you know, the past two nights have held a lot of beauty for me. On Thursday, April 1, I got to go to a Jon Foreman show that had been booked just the day before (for those of you who don't know, Jon Foreman is the lead singer of Switchfoot who also does solo stuff and has another side project with a guy from Nickel Creek). Jon Foreman is one of my heroes. If you pay attention to me on facebook at all, you've seen me quote him. For that matter, if you read this blog, you've seen me quote him. If you've been around me in person, you've quite possibly heard me mention him as well. To get to see him was one of those wild, storybook things that should have happened in someone else's life.

It was a small room, but it was packed long before Jon came in (he was 45 minutes late). And then it was just the room and the one guitar and our voices, close together, hanging thick on the air. Between songs there was often a breathless quiet, reaching towards sound and song. It was one of the best concert experiences I've ever had, because of the closeness and the songs and the words that were spoken.

Jon had already done far more than necessary (he had actually set the show up and offered to play for free, despite his hectic schedule). But afterwards he stayed to talk to some of us. I got to go and give one of my heroes and role models a hug. And even in the brief moments we had to say hello and goodbye, I felt an awe much like disbelief. I was shaking for a few hours afterwards, more because I couldn't believe it had happened than anything else.

The next day, I headed out to a Skillet and TobyMac show with two siblings, two friends from school, and our awesome friend Kate who is staying with us for the next two weeks. We got to the venue, and I immediately got to say hello to another friend who was also coming for the concert. A few hours of waiting in line followed. When the doors finally opened, the ushers weren't sure what to do with me at first (I had a spot in the front pit area, but it wasn't a VIP ticket), but eventually I was led up to the front and behind the barrier where I got a spot at the very front. I hadn't been that close at a Skillet show since my first, nearly two years ago now.

House of Heroes opened the night with four songs that felt far too short, as I knew they would. Even for an opening band, the set felt too short. When I heard Skillet's intro starting, I felt the usual intense adrenaline rush. The rest of their set was pure joy for me, which was more welcome than words can express after the stress of my last Skillet concert. I was so close, and I was having fun screaming the words along and headbanging and jumping. John Cooper saw me and starting laughing, and he pointed directly at me. He made eye contact with me and pointed at me several more times during the night, probably partly because I was very noticeable as one of the few Panheads in middle of a group of TobyMac fans.

TobyMac's set was fun, though for me I was ready for it to be over about a third of the way through. He is an excellent performer, but I don't really go to concerts because of the entertainment aspect of it, so I didn't really connect to it as much as the others did. However, it was fun to get to help carry TobyMac as he crowd surfed-- twice. That's one plus to having a spot in the pit. I had never had the chance to participate in crowd surfing before, and it was a first that was definitely a lot of fun and built up the energy in the room.

All of that feels a bit long for simply an introduction. It feels like it could be its own separate blog post: I could wrap it up here, say "I was given awesome moments and music," end with some encouragement or resolution that would make me feel like I'd done the two concerts justice. But I don't feel that would fit just now, particularly not since midnight wandered by 15 minutes ago, and I am now writing this on Easter.

I think more than anything else, these past two nights have reminded me to hope. They have reminded me that hiding and running only work for so long before God sends love to find you. When you think about it, that is the entire concept of Good Friday, of Easter-- the world rebelled. Humanity ran and hid in the darkness, clutching their own emptiness tight and refusing to let go. And so God sent hope to find us, in the form of Love. Jesus lived and died for love-- and He came back to life for love. And it is incredibly unright and unfair and undeserved. Grace always looks like that, which is part of what makes it so beautiful.

I spent most of my life thinking that grace was something to be earned or uncovered, that I had to somehow track down mercy if I ever wanted to be whole. I believe now that that is wrong. We don't find grace. Grace finds us. It tracks us down, breaks through walls, runs over stains, crawls through broken windows, and finds us when we least expect it. The only thing we have to do is say yes.

And I guess maybe I'm thinking about this because I have been once again struck by how unfair it is. Here's a bit of honesty for you: February and March were two of the most confusing and painful months of my life, and I can't talk about why. However, it was all my fault. And as I found myself stripped down to operating on just a shadow of who I should have been, I didn't feel like the kind of person who should get a hug from Jon Foreman or get to sit at the very front of a Skillet show. And quite bluntly, I really don't deserve all that. It's tempting for me to look around and say that everyone else deserves joy so much more than I do. But grace doesn't work like that. Grace has an odd tendency to track me down in the darkest nights and sing hope to me through the words of a song.

Remember today that grace will always be there to find you again. Jesus's love in stepping into our world promises that much. Don't be afraid to say yes. Don't be afraid to let grace light you up with joy again. It's God's beautiful, crazy plan to bring our dead hearts to life again.

And that gives me hope. Happy Easter.

- Elraen -

Of Men and Angels

[This is a piece that I wrote on one of many dark nights in the past several weeks. I wasn't sure at first if I would share it, but eventually decided that if there's a chance that it could connect with even one person, then it would be worth it.]

Sometimes I wonder if those of us who focus so much on the unseen-- on the angels and the demons of the world, on the breathtaking heights of hope and the bitter price of pain-- are somehow defective. It's as though the cramped world we live in wants to tie us down on the dark street corners and in the straight-cornered offices with our sheets of facts and our inventories and our annual reports. There is a value in that, but often it's no more than a safety in lying low. It's easier to miss the stones and arrows of life that way-- easier to duck below the hurt and the shame and the ignorance and the bitterness that are so thick in the air.

At moments when we stand, when we reach out our hands to something beyond merely existing, there is a good chance that we'll take a few hits. We may take some shots to the chest that seem to make it impossible to breathe. We lose someone. Life gets complicated. There's not enough money. We compromise, knowing it's wrong. We find ourselves in dark places we never thought we'd be. If we get out of it alive at all, we might choose to hide from it again. No more reaching.

But if we hide then we are not just hiding from the darkness, but also the light. If we spend life hiding in our closets, close with our skeletons and the ghosts of past doubts, then we will be safe from continued hurts. But we will never know how far we would have gone, had we been brave enough to keep going. To love when it hurt. To sacrifice when it meant losing everything. To sing while bleeding. To walk in a dark night with eyes fixed on the stars.

The things that are worth the most in the end are the things that are hardest to reach. Of course there are times when we break ourselves over nothing, for the sake of pride, for the sake of misguided emotion, for the sake of empty ambition-- these things happen a lot, when we listen to ourselves instead of God. But when we reach for things of Heaven-- things of hope, of faith, of love-- we will run into opposition. We will have to fight many harsh battles, and some of those battles will be lost. But ultimately, if we never turn to reach at all, then life will be like a flat-lined heart that never really began to beat at all.

Perhaps this is why the people who care the most about serving God, about love, about hope, are the ones who feel hurt the most. They're reaching for the hard things.

I asked myself once what true love really is. The answer was Jesus-- the definition of love, the one who had everything and became nothing, humbled and broken to make life from the death in our hearts. His love was sacrifice, the sacrifice of all He was. If we are not sacrificing for others, it is not love. It is liking what they have to offer us maybe, or some level of affection, but it is not love. To start loving someone with the expectation of never being the one that's hurt, never being the one that's left behind, never being the one that's lonely and uncertain and afraid-- that would be like diving into the middle of the ocean and expecting to have your feet on the ground the whole time. It doesn't work that way. It's not easy, and it wasn't made to be easy. Love, hope, faith-- they were made to be beautiful and above all worth it.

Jon Foreman once said that he'd come to realize that most of his songs are an attempt to come to terms with pain. I would have to echo him, because in the end, the words I write and the songs I sing and even the words sharpied on my skin are the same thing. But ultimately I have to believe that to reach, to hope even when the light fades to black, to trust even when the earth crumbles, to love even with scars from a thousand knives in your back-- that is the only answer that can bring peace. Not happiness-- happiness is too obscure a concept and much too far away for the dark hours of the night when we think about these kinds of things. But peace, in knowing that our God has not abandoned us, that His love for us and His eternal faithfulness will always be the surging tide to lift us through the choking smoke of this earth to the gentle sunlight of His rest.

So I will be a dreamer. I will believe in big things, in love and in pain and in scratching below the quiet surface to the screaming souls below. We live in a world of men and angels, of the broken and the eternal, the darkness and the light. And as I drift between the two, I will trust God's love to draw me close again, to be my sense of wholeness and peace, to surge through me into the darkness surrounding.

"Oh, the tongues of men and angels I speak, but lack love. Oh love, will I stab you in the back? Working every day, I'm afraid I forgot to show what's most important: love." - The Rocket Summer

- Elraen -