I’ve written a good deal of spiritual content on here. In fact, from the very genesis of this blog, I’ve attempted to rebrand with a more spiritual lean a few times. Ultimately, my interests when it comes to writing spans way too many topics to focus on one particular niche. Music is another one of my biggest special interests, and writing is one way I process how I feel about the music I love and create myself. So the weekly devotionals I had committed to writing ended up languishing as I pivoted more toward music.
But I had this crazy thought. Because when you’re actually looking, you start to find messages from God in everything, including the secular songs you enjoy. That’s where the idea of Rock & Roll Devotionals came from. What if I combined my love of theology with my love of music?
This first one came to me while I was driving home from training for my new job. Full disclosure — things have not been great. I’ve been coasting off of what little money I’d made from my part-time minimum wage gig in Indiana when I was there briefly, but I was officially down to $11 as of a few mornings ago, and I still needed gas to get to training. There’s a good reason I started a GoFundMe to stay afloat at the moment. I’m in the process of rebuilding my life from scratch after all of the dreams I’d built had been shattered. In tarot, they call it a “Tower” moment. Sometimes, everything has to crumble to pieces before you can truly realize who you are and what you need.
While I was driving, I had a strange urge to revisit a song from my favorite Arizona-based emo band that isn’t Jimmy Eat World. The band’s called The Maine, and while their earliest material is pretty standard MySpace-era fare, they continued to evolve and incorporate aspects of pop, 90s alternative, and classic rock to alchemize a sound I really appreciate. That’s not to say their oldest stuff is bad, though. Enter “Whoever She Is,” a track off their 2008 full-length debut, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.
“Whoever She Is” is a tranquil, acoustic-driven ballad about the struggles and anxieties of life, personified as the unnamed “she.” “She” isn’t necessarily a girl who broke your heart, although she very well could be. But she could be anything — rainy days, minimum wage, finding your car stolen when you’re already late to work. Throughout the song, John O’Callaghan croons about the ways his life is falling apart, and yet he has an unshakable sense of zen. He’ll be okay, and so will you, the song insists.
When I truly took in the words of the song, it took me back to my Sunday school lessons on the verse about the sparrow. If you didn’t grow up in church, you might not have heard this one. It’s not one of the more well-known “feel good” verses old church ladies quote on Facebook, but it deserves to be. In Matthew 10:29-31, Jesus says:
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”
If you are not a bird enthusiast, you might think sparrows sound lovely, but rest assured that to much of the population of the planet, they are a low-tier garbage bird. They happen to be the most widely distributed bird in the world and are even considered pests in some parts of it. Hardly anyone’s favorite bird is the sparrow when you have much cooler options like eagles and swans and parakeets. But God still cares about them, for some reason.
And He cares about us even more.
I guess that’s what “Whoever She Is” has come to represent for me. It’s that feeling of no matter what comes my way, I’m still held by the Great Author, and He’s still busy writing my story. Maybe He’s thrown some gnarly plot twists at me, but it’s never anything I can’t handle. That’s the beauty of it all. We’re never truly abandoned in this life. There’s a greater story being written that we don’t even understand yet.
I keep going back to this poem I remember reading in my grandmother’s bathroom on a little plaque that was hanging by the toilet. As a kid, there were no phones, so whenever I had to poop, I was stuck reading whatever magazines or shampoo bottles were nearby. But now and then, I’d reread that plaque. It was the tale of a man questioning God. “You said you’d always walk beside me,” the forlorn man asked, “but where were you when your footsteps in the sand disappeared?” The Good Lord’s response is that when there was only one set of footprints, that’s when He was carrying him. That stuck with me all these years.
Lately I’ve been feeling a bit like that man. Where has God been in the midst of ny suffering? Turns out, He was with me the whole time. Perhaps it just took a simple ballad by one of my favorite emo bands to remind me of that fact.
JESSA JOYCE 