I can remember buying my first album. It was a cassette tape of Steven Curtis Chapman's “The Great Adventure,” and I'll admit I got it because he just looked so cool and confident on the cover. I don't actually have many specific memories with this album, besides singing along while playing in my sister's room, laughing at his goofy rap, and thinking his twang was so cool. For some reason, the only clear image I have with it is blasting it from our living room stereo and racing around the yard, just overwhelmed with the sound and the fact that I owned a tape! I was maybe 6 or 7, I'm guessing, so take all of this with a grain of “kids are cute” salt.
I actually have more stories related to his next two albums, partly because I was older and partly because there were more events (family roadtrips, concerts, etc) that happened with them. But this is where it all started, and how fitting! “The Great Adventure” – how was I to know what a great adventure lay ahead of me? At 6 years old, I liked cartoons and I wanted to grow up to be Steven Curtis Chapman because of how he leaned on his guitar. That was about it.
In the next few years, I had two major surgeries, one of which was life-threatening. A few years after that, I would find my “heart's song” in a band called Five Iron Frenzy and eventually start my own band that would give me my two best friends and some of the best moments a musician can ask for. From there, I'd go through the jungle called “college” and countless roadtrips to countless places with countless friends. I would see a church rise and fall, and come to understand why. I would find my love for Scripture in a small group lead by one of the wisest men I've ever known. I'd meet my life mentor, learn tomes of wisdom from him while just talking in his living room, and then feel the unbearable ache of loss at his death. I would fall in far too much love and get rejected every time, and realize over and over that God knows what He's doing. And now I'm an uncle to three amazing boys, and I write books – I'm a writer! When the heck did that happen? Sure, we're still in the “starving artist” stage of it, but that's just part of The Great Adventure called Life!
You see, life is an adventure all by itself, but life with Christ is a great adventure! It's the truth of this album that has stuck with me all these years and proven true time and time again. God just has this way of making it better through and through. It's His grace that catapults us into this other realm – and we see the world as a new creation. He tells us in the gospels, “I came that you may have life and have it to the fullest.” And it is in Him that I have found that full life, sometimes with its ups and sometimes with its down, but always with Christ; always falling back on grace, which remains faithful despite all odds, fitting and present in every season, good and bad.
It has been a wild to now, and who knows where we're headed from here. It is with freedom in Christ that we move forward. “We've got a trail to blaze! (Woooah!)”