![]() So as I said, I’m walking into the gym for a Relient K concert, 10 years after I first started listening to them. It’s music that can bring back the subtle nuances of emotions and desires and fears that carried you through the days and months of your life–so that when you hear it: you’re not just in the present, but experiencing the past as well. It’s funny what a band can see you through–fascinating, really, the way their music can chart your own growth…map your own life. I hear the words of the songs, and know them as my own: “a fallen man’s praise”. The lyrics are poignantly human, and speak honestly about the guilt, failure, confusion, and disappointment of living in the reality of our own sinfulness, but they also manage to cling to the hope and joy that come from being loved unconditionally by God. I’ve been listening to Relient K for over 10 years now, and on long car trips I can listen to their albums one after another and hear the story of my own walk with Christ. They never took themselves too seriously, and–most importantly–their lyrics actually provided a narrative of the Christian life that I could relate to. Their songs not only had that light-hearted pop-punk sound of happiness, but were also clever and funny. The guys were young and cool and relatable. Not all the cheesy Christian bands in the world could have kept me away from Relient K. Rather early on I had decided that Christian music was boring, often corny, and provided hardly any lyrics that I could actually relate to.Įxcept in the case of one band. Except for a few embarrassingly cheesy Christian CD’s that had initially guided my entrance into the world of music, I was a musical product of Blink-182 and all the pop-punk rock bands and Vans Warped Tours that followed so gloriously in their wake. ![]() By the time I lost music altogether I had long since abandoned any pretense of caring about the Christian music scene. “Depression” was the word I typed into the Google search bar, which lead me to the identically titled Wikipedia article, which helped me to finally understand why I had lost the ability to enjoy anything, why I had no appetite and couldn’t get out of bed, and why the notes of my favorite songs no longer meant anything to me. As far as concerts go, I had thought that they were over for me–that they had simply become relics of my high school and early college years, along with all the music I had so loved and then lost in the autumn of 2008. I know that I was hoping to find my sister and enjoy the show–but I considered neither of those very likely given the crowd of people crammed inside the gym and the fact that I hadn’t been to a concert in over five years. I’m not sure what I thought I would find when I stepped inside the gymnasium the last Saturday night in March.
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