soulscape

So I was driving to the office this morning. I am not what you would call a “morning person” so oftentimes I’m in a slightly bad mood in the morning. There is no particular reason, but I think because I’m tired in the morning, I am more prone to being “attacked.” Attacked by what, you might ask. Well, negative thoughts. There’s other ways to name these things, but I’ll just leave it at negative thoughts for now.

But I do believe when you’re tired, you are more vulnerable. For me, that’s in the morning (for a few hours after I wake up), and late at night, right before bed. But it’s definitely more acute in the morning. Some people wake up in the morning energized, refreshed, wide-eyed. That’s not me. I wake up and it’s as if gravity is twice as strong, pulling down on my eyes, pulling down on me.

I have a great new distraction, though, as I drive to work. My friend Mike Tyus recently gave me a car stereo that plays mp3 CDs and has an input for my iPod. Having just installed it the other day, I burnt an mp3 CD with 35 songs on it. A handful of these songs are Christian worship songs, which I don’t really listen to much nowadays. This morning though, I decided to play them on the way to work. Most of them were “old school” songs from the 90s that I used to listen to in college fellowship. They were easing my mood a bit, and I was beginning to feel better. You can say, my soul was being soothed, that God was speaking to me….

But as I was on the freeway in the slow lane, a silver Acura with dark, dark-tinted windows sped by in the lane merging in from the right. He sped several cars ahead of me and in the very last moment, as his lane exitted the freeway, he cut into the slow lane. He had squeezed into a small space going at a high speed.

I moved into the next lane, my mood already darkening. I would have stared at him as I passed him, but my lane was curving to the right and I had to focus on the road at the last instant as I passed him. Those negative thoughts started coming. I’m usually a pretty mellow guy, but as I said, it’s on that morning drive to work that my temper can be tested.

He must be a young asian or latino male, I thought, since living in the San Gabriel Valley, that’s who you usually see driving “suped up” Hondas and Acuras, driving like they own the road. The silver Acura then sped by in the slow lane, going at least 80-85 mph. What a shallow soul I thought — what a shallow soul to put so much of his identity into his car, driving like no one else mattered …

I was about to exit the freeway myself, and I was getting lost in these thoughts. Shallow soul, shallow soul, shallow soul. Whack! Something hit my window. It was a blur, so I didn’t know what it was — something that fell from a tree? It didn’t leave a mark on the window, but the sudden, sharp sound against my window broke me out of my trance. The music I was listening to came back to me. It was the song “Hungry (Fall on My Knees)” by Kathryn Scott.

Hungry I come to You
For I know You satisfy
I am empty but I know
Your love does not run dry

Strange how the music completely disappeared from my consciousness in the last few minutes as I succumbed to my thoughts. They were thoughts of judgment, condemnation, anger.

Now I sit here and I remember when I was younger, how I sometimes also drove with the same attitude. I would speed, I would weave in and out of traffic. I was young and foolish, but now am I old and hypocritical? Is it I with the shallow soul? Who one moment was trying to soak in God’s love and in the next was judging and condemning a young man I didn’t even know?

This is the daily struggle. Who do you succumb to? What do you choose to fill your mind with? What do you choose to fill your heart with? There’s a thin line between two sides, and it is easy to walk over to the other side, while believing you are with God.