A Challenge

Hello Friends!

Wow, it’s been quite a while since my last (real) update. A lot has happened since last spring. For those of you haven’t heard from me since then, I am very sorry. I’m most definitely one of the worst people when it comes to staying in contact over long distances. I hope to do a better job of it in the coming days. For now I hope this will suffice!

A lot certainly has happened, not least of which is my graduation from the University of South Florida. In the summer of 2012 I moved from dear Michigan to the sunshine state to pursue a master’s in jazz performance. A big deal! Two years, many concerts, countless rehearsals and a trip to Italy later and I now have a very nice piece of paper saying that I am a master of jazz performance, or something like that. It’s fun to say (and even MORE fun to put on a resume) but the whole affair ends up being a bit underwhelming once it’s over. My last act as a student was having one of my professors sign a piece of paper; so ended my second college career. That was they very beginning of May. The rest of the month saw me scrambling for cash and lodging as my housemates and I left our apartment for who knows where, and I made ready for a trip home to Michigan.

In June I loaded up my brave little saturn and drove the 20 hours to the Mitten. The drive was mostly uneventful, save when I got myself stranded at a truck stop in rural Kentucky at 4:30am. Let’s just say Kentucky didn’t leave a very good impression after that. Soon enough I found myself on the familiar streets of Grand Rapids, finding a bed at Randy’s Tavern, my dear friend Garrett Stier’s apartment/studio/workshop/greenhouse. June of 2014 was what that summer month meant to be, packed with weddings, beach runs, beer quests and many reunions. What really defined June, however, was an idea and ambition Garrett, Lucas Taylor, Tyler Stitt and had been working over since the previous November. First and Last was/is a dream come true of sorts, one Garrett and I had been scheming since a fateful meeting one night in Nasheville. The actual release was nothing mind-boggling or spectacular; we played three shows with small audiences, but man it was good, good for the heart, good to have something worked and dreamed and cared for over many months come to life. You can check it out at welldiggermusic.bandcamp.com. We’d love for you to hear it!

The months since then have been quiet, easy. I moved into a house with 5 guys in July, living fully and cheap as dirt, working myself up as a barista at a local Tampa brew company. If I’m honest, music has taken a back seat in my doings since June. It’s been time to rest, to recharge, to build the slightest semblance of financial security. Fall was most of those things most of the time, but I never shook this need to make, to get out and get going. Where? I have no idea. My bones have itched for it, and I’m slowly, carefully starting to make it happen, to begin realizing what it is I am meant to do. In truth, I was burned out after graduating. I had just run out of the structured, organized progression of training that comes with schooling; I didn’t know what I really wanted to do. In truth, I still don’t. All I know for sure is that I need to write, I need to make music happen. Somehow.  That brings us to today! Having resolved to record an EP by May 26th, my birthday, I’ve been working on arrangements for songs that I’ve previously written. Thanks to a friend’s post on Facebook, I’ve accepted another challenge on top of this one.

The challenge, called the RPM Challenge, is to write and record an album in 28 days. 10 songs and/or 35 minutes of music. I can’t really express how much I’ve needed this, how I’ve secretly ached for it. Who knows how the ‘good’ the results will be? This is the kind of start, the kind of creative motion I’ve needed for a long while. I have a measly five days left, and a great deal more to do, but I am hoping to make this album, to triumph over this challenge. Friends, please pray for me. Whatever happens with these songs, they are for you. You can check out my progress HERE. See you at the finish line.

Kindness

In light of late tragedies and further tragedies they enable:


Oh to love kindness
to breath with sighs
that ease the pains of life
and yearn for another's good.

Is it not a blessing to speak grace into another, to ache for
them, dream for them? In a
world bent on hatred,
doesn't mercy win the day?

Oh to love kindness
To breath words of life
and speak them to another
that they might know it well

To know the one who first
was kind, who brought it as a gift,
to bleed it, bleed it all.

What would happen if we learned to stop hating each other?

Oh to love kindness, to know it at its source.
To receive more than we could ever give, this
is the promise give; this is the gospel known.

To know it is to know freedom, true, right, and real. To know it is to know life in your bones and love in your chest, to beat with a heart of hot blood, of fire at smolder. It is to look at the world with wonder for how such a thing could be, to rejoice in its magnificence and yearn for its mending. For to yearn for the world's mending, in its proper place, is to yearn for our own. For health and grace and love.

For kindness to be shown.

A Letter

To friends far off:

My friends, how I long for you. How I am for you and wish to be with you. I think of you and hope for you in earnest. From afar I see little pieces, bits of light in the expanse of your life, and I am joyful. If I'm honest, being so far from you sucks. The distance is right and good and for a purpose, but it still sucks.

I ache for days shared, for loud nights and quiet mornings, for the sun shining in your eyes, making the moments light as the breaking dawn. I miss our feet tramping through snow and ice and grass and sand, those 'ventures with no goal in sight save the next bend, the next dune, the next crag in the icy wasteland. I miss your hands, stained with paint and ink and care, calloused with much making, eager to grab hold of whatever joy awaits on the horizon.

And I miss your voices. I miss the shouts over a winning match at the gaming table or an insane disc toss. I miss having my ears ring with your laughter, with the songs we would sing together. I miss those conversations over coffee or craft brews when we'd wrestle truth into each other's souls with the best words we could muster.

Mostly, I just miss you, you in all your vibrance. I long for the day when we can simply take in the morning light together. May it come soon.

-Zach

A Word to a Friend

Hey folks. Sorry it's been ages since my last post. Suffice it to say that life in sunny Florida isn't half bad. I might get to a proper post later, but for now I want to give you something else. This is an email between a friend and I. A couple months ago I lent her the book Lost in Transition, a stark depiction of life for teens and tweens of 18 to 24 years. I decided to post this because, well, I say things in it that I don't often enough say to myself, let alone to others. They are the words of our hope.


"I read this today:
"They had difficulty seeing the possible distinction between objective moral truth and relative human invention. That is not because they are dumb. It seems rather that they simply cannot, for whatever reason, believe in - or sometimes even conceive of - a given, objective truth, fact, reality, or nature of the world that is independent of their subjective experience and in relation to which they or others might learn or be persuaded to change." - page 222

And this as well:
"The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so."  -Romans 8:6-7

They seem eerily similar, don't they?  Is it possible that words like "citizenship", "moral responsibility", or "helping others" don't show up in their vocabulary because they aren't able to truly understand it based on the "laws" (or lack of) they have chosen to submit to? You don't see them as hopeless, do you - Zach? Have you thrown your hands up in the air toward them?"

My response
They seem eerily similar because, in fact, they are the same.

1 Corinthians 1:

¹⁸ For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹ For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
    and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

1 Corinthians 2:

¹⁴ Those who are unspiritual^[e] do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

1 Corinthians 3:

¹⁸ Do not deceive yourselves. If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. ¹⁹ For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written,

“He catches the wise in their craftiness,”

²⁰ and again,

“The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise,
    that they are futile.”

Perhaps a darker image from Ecclesiastes 10:

^"5 There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, as great an error as if it proceeded from the ruler: ⁶ folly is set in many high places, and the rich sit in a low place. ⁷ I have seen slaves on horseback, and princes walking on foot like slaves."

My using the last bit from Ecclesiastes is more for imagery than anything, yet, doesn't it bear a striking resemblance to our culture today? We worship foolishness, the idea of a carefree society where we can and should do anything we please just for the hell of it. YOLO! (I cringe every time I hear that). We treat the slightest notion of authority as despotism, and liming oneself as weakness. Privilege has been warped to inalienable right, unless it is extreme (in the cases of the rich), where it is a result of some societal disparity, rather than hard work, discipline, and ingenuity. A friend of mine put up a post recently on facebook that sums things up pretty well, I think. (I linked it to your wall.)

Do I see these people has hopeless? Have I thrown up my hands at them? At times, yes. I am frustrated and angry at the depravity of what I read in Lost in Transition. It is why I despair when I stumble, or when I see my friends, true Christians to the core, buy into the empty pleasures this world has to offer. It makes me ache, because the kind of selfishness that worldly logic, which can seem so innocent and inconsequential in some situations, is the same logic that leads to all the travesties we see in the world: slavery, prostitution, rape, murder, etc etc etc etc etc. Perhaps my reactions are extreme; I'm sure one can find it easy to point me out as a judgmental person. I very well could be! I catch myself leaning away from grace once in a while.

Perhaps it's because I don't like the image of cheap grace. This grace that is extended to humanity came at a cost, after all. It cost Jesus, the very son of God, his life. Even more, his life was taken in one of the most disgraceful of ways. He bore the cross of shame, whipped beyond human recognition, and died as the lowliest of criminals. When I sin, I stand with the crowd that watched him die, that mocked him, that spat at his agony. I am equal with those quoted in Lost in Transition. In this event humanity is unified; we all stand under that tree, watching the son of God bleed.

Yet, there on that hill rests our hope. Out of an unmarked hole in the rock walked our strength. Do I see those in Lost in Transition as hopeless? No, because the hope they might have is the same hope that we have. The grace extended to us is one in the same with the grace extended to them. To say that they have no hope is to mark myself as hopeless. It is in this that we find the beauty of the Gospel:

^"10 And as he sat at dinner^[a] in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting^[b] with him and his disciples. ¹¹ When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” ¹² But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. ¹³ Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” -Matthew 9

It is for these people, the Lost in Transition, that Jesus came! It is why He is here! It is why He died! How glorious will it be when people such as these come to faith?! How gut-wrenchingly beautiful will it be when they might know the truth of these words?

^"3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, ⁴ just as he chose us in Christ^[b] before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. ⁵ He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, ⁶ to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. ⁷ In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace ⁸ that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight ⁹ he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, ¹⁰ as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. ¹¹ In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance,^[c] having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, ¹² so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. ¹³ In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; ¹⁴ this^[d] is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory.

-Ephesians 1

This truth, this promise (which is making me want to weep in Starbucks as I read it) is why we proclaim the Truth. Because for some who are lost, the word of Truth will be to them like the breaking of the dawn in their hearts, and the Spirit of God will stir in their guts and rattle their bones and free them, at last, from their chains of slavery to sin and self.

There is hope. Even for me. Even for you. Even for them. To God be the glory. Amen.

From Storms and Palms

I am a fan of thunderstorms. I love the boom that fills the house after a good crack of lightning and the clamor of rain when it falls in buckets. It washes away the dust and grime of the everyday just as it drown out the noise of cars and air-conditioners, a blanket of sound. Once in a while I get to wake up to one of these storms.  It's the sort of thing that makes you want to sit by a window, read a book, and hold your friends close. When I watch the rain pound the brick from the back porch as I did a few days ago, book and pencil in hand, those desires come keen. Have there been any good storms in Holland, I wonder?

Leaving is a funny thing.  June saw me acting like a fidgety six-year-old at a doctor's office, stuffing as many animal crackers into his pockets before having to go. I was safeguarding those last moments, as if I was planting a flag so that no other place or circumstance might claim them. I treated every farewell as my last, should circumstances not allow another meeting. The truly final farewell was the best. A bunch of our crew (some I had thought I wouldn't see again) were sprawled across a living room on a friday night like so many times before, talking, snacking, and watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. With that image in my mind my parents and I packed up books, clothes, and a beastly dresser into a U-haul, stopped by LJ's for a farewell coffee from my sister, and began the long, long drive to Tampa, Florida. I became one of the Hope grads, scattered or soon-to-be. The gravity of the thing came as slowly as the passing of the miles. I was leaving my home, a place of such grace and goodness, for a place of utter mystery.

Yet God has proven his faithfulness. There are heaps and heaps of goodness waiting to be found here. When my housing plans fell through and I had no other options, He provided not only a better place to live, but lovely hosts who opened there home to me until I can move in. I have found a church, and (thank heaven!) they have offered me the chance to play in their worship. More and more every day I am seeing that it is good for me to be here. All this and the adventure has only just begun.

Even so, I miss Holland, and I miss Hope. I miss LJ's and 8th street and the smell of Dimnent in September. I miss the parades of students in the pine grove those first weeks of school and the thousand-strong voices singing to God. I miss you, my friends, my family, my people of Hope. I do not doubt that I have met and will continue to meet new people to call my people here in Tampa, but it is because of you, your leadership, your friendship, and your faithfulness to God that I have become who I am today. I eagerly look forward to the day when we can meet again as student and pastor, mentee and mentor, brother and sister, geeks and goons, singers of songs, people of Hope. Until then, know that I love you and miss you so, so dearly.

Letters from Africa - Day 12: Epilogue

Thursday, June 28th, 2012

To me, today is the beginning of an epilogue, the last moments of a story before the book finally runs out of pages. We didn't do anything groundbreaking or exciting; today was simply an ending of things. After packing all of our gera, clothes, and newly-acquired swag, we made our way to the Academy for one last visit. There was no music or teaching today. We simply sat with the students, Maxwell, and Richmond, saying our thank-yous, telling stories, and praying blessings over the team, the students, and the academy. It was the epitome of the long goodbye, with hundreds of pictures being taken and hugs given.

Needless to say it was a long time before we loaded into the min van-bus to begin the four hour drive to Lusaka, our last adventure in Zambia. We made a few stops along the way.  Once we stopped at a roadside produce market. We had hardly stopped moving when the bus was bombarded by banana venders whose marketing strategy is to shove fruit in each and every open window of the vehicle.  Another time we hit an especially large bump and had to rescue a suitcase that had flown off the trailer. Our final stop was in Lusaka, arguably the most urban place we've visited in Zambia. We stopped at a grocery store to grab some Zambian foodstuffs before dinner at Food Fayre, our last meal in the country. It seemed like we had just loaded the van-bus for the last time when we got out in front of the airport, grabbed our stuff, and said our final farewells to our drivers, Moses and Rogers, and Petronellah, probably the best hostess one could ask for. The next hour or so was a blur. Check-in. Security. Gate. Tarmac. Safety procedures. Full thrust. Pull on the yoke. Farewell, Zambia.

It's a little strange, heading back to the States. I think Michael Flanagin said it best: "We're happy to go home, but sad that we have to leave." No more Zambian time. No more rides in the jank van-bus-whatever. No more "Ga Mwamba"s for introductions. No more morning greetings from Petronellah. No more bream carcasses or nshima-hands. No more lessons at the academy. We're leaving a lot behind.

Even so, we're bringing a lot home with us as well. We came to Choma to teach, but we were students just as much as everyone else who came to the academy.  We taught music, but these Zambians taught us the power of determination and the ability to accomplish great things even with so little. They taught us that a broken spirit is not a dead one, that joy is not dependent on wealth or status, and that good hospitality can be practiced no matter what you have to offer a guest. They taught us what it means to be wholly dependent on God.

It is for this reason that I think everyone needs to experience this kind of trip. There is so much to learn beyond the familiar, beyond our own understanding of how life works and how it ought to be. If we as people are willing to go, to reach out beyond the familiar with open hearts and minds, to fill needs on the terms of the needy, then we will be far better people for it. This I think is the hidden second half of Poetice's mission: that we might learn through these short-term missions how to be better servants for the long-term.

For more information about Poetice International and its ministry in Zambia be sure to check www.poetice.com and follow @livepoetice on twitter.

Letters from Africa - Day 11.5

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

16:00-23:00

We left Livingstone in a hurry, doing some last-minute haggling and scarfing fast-food chicken and fries in the bus-van. Since our concert at the Sun Hotel was cancelled the night before, Richmond scheduled another concert for 18:00 today in Choma. None of us were really looking forward to it. We were all tired from the game drive, the falls, and the market, having gone non-stop since 7 in the morning. The fact that we were late didn't help our nerves either. By the time we made it to Choma Secondary School, we were behind schedule by over half an hour. Even in Zambian time, our tardiness made us feel rushed and agitated. To add to the tension, the power had gone out at the school; our only light came from a bunch of LED lanters that Richmond had strung up, barely enough for the musicians to read their music. After quickly cobbling together a concert order, we began our concert.

This could have been the beginning of a bad night, but things have a wonderful way of simply working out on this trip.  By the end of the frist song all of the tension and anxiety had melted away. The time didn't matter anymore; the music had taken over.  Even the lighting situation, which was a hassle at first, lent a feeling of beauty and intimacy, as if this were a concert by candlelight. Everyone from both the team and the academy performed well, I for one playing one of the best sax solos of my life. By the end, the audience was eager to give a standing ovation, and many thanked us personally once it had all concluded. What we had begun as a stressful evening became the most joyous of our stay in Zambia, and there could have been no better way to spend our last one here. We spent the last hours of the night debriefing as a team, reflecting on what we had seen, done, and what we are to do once we arrive home.

For more information about Poetice International, its ministry in Zambia, and updates on this trip be sure to check www.poetice.com and follow @livepoetice on twitter.