{"id":370,"date":"2016-09-10T13:24:19","date_gmt":"2016-09-10T18:24:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/?p=370"},"modified":"2016-09-10T13:24:19","modified_gmt":"2016-09-10T18:24:19","slug":"i-hate-christian-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/i-hate-christian-music\/","title":{"rendered":"I hate Christian Music"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">To be perfectly honest, sometimes I just hate Christian music. I don&#8217;t hate all of it, there are some great people out there, and\u00a0I grew up with it, but the last ten years or so it has gone far too often to an entirely new place. I call it dishonesty. That sounds harsh, so let me try to explain. I totally agree that the life of a Christian can be really difficult- it\u2019s a much harder life to walk out then you realize when you sign up! I also totally agree that as Christians, we have the beauty of faith, and the amazingness of love and joy and promise in the Lord. <\/span><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">But oddly enough, these two very conflicting topics are getting too mixed up in the Christian life, and it\u2019s bleeding into the music and getting on my nerves (and I am obviously not the only one who sees it that way, check out the video below).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">\u00a0<\/span><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bwwhkKPEieE\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">For instance, I am a physician. I am a pediatrician and I have to be real and vulnerable in order to talk with patients. I cannot walk into the room of a little girl with a deadly disease and say, &#8220;this is\u00a0a hard season, but I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;ll be fine.&#8221; Because to be perfectly honest, I don&#8217;t know that- I know it is possible it won&#8217;t be fine but I hope for something more. But in that moment, I don&#8217;t offer them awful news and empty hope, I don&#8217;t offer them harsh honesty mixed with a joyful tone about unlikely possibility. There&#8217;s a time a place for everything (Ecclesiastes 3:1-14). So I cautiously and empathetically tell them the truth. And I let that moment\u00a0be about sorrow and confusion and brokenness and reality. And I leave it there. <span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>Because you can&#8217;t move on to anything else real if you haven&#8217;t been through honesty and vulnerability first.<\/strong><\/span> It&#8217;s not worth anything real if you don&#8217;t hit the bottom and break so God can heal it. Not in medicine, not in life, not in relationships, and not in music. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">So as not to use a real song and\u00a0offend any real musicians who I\u2019m sure are all awesome people and doing their best, I\u2019m going to contrast typical Christian music songs with Linkin Park. Because I was a Christian when I first started listening to them and because of the bondage I was in to perfectionism and problematic way I was pretending bad stuff didn\u2019t exist and I was fine, their music brought me to a place where I admitted it, and let that moment of pain be real. Some of the lyrics to the song <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=eVTXPUF4Oz4\">In the End<\/a> were \u201cOne thing, I don\u2019t know why, it doesn\u2019t even matter how hard you try\u2026 I kept everything inside and even though I tried, it all fell apart.\u201d Though I knew it wasn&#8217;t true, my life reflected the lyrics in the song more than it reflected your typical Christian lyrics like \u201cIt\u2019s\u00a0a desert\u00a0sometimes but it\u2019s okay.\u201d And that song got me to a place where I finally admitted that yeah, I was struggling, and life wasn\u2019t all gumdrops and lollipops. And this was the lesson I needed to learn- God eventually showed me that He fixes things, not me. And when I finally admitted to God that life sucked sometimes and I couldn\u2019t fix it, that was when he finally started to heal me. But to be honest with you, I only got there by listening to non-Christian music, because they were genuine about life in a way I couldn\u2019t find anywhere else.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">I love bands like Linkin Park who will pour their soul out on a page in song because they&#8217;re real! They&#8217;re not pretending or trying to hide sadness or trying to say something positive because it sounds good. They&#8217;re not faking anything- they&#8217;ve completely risked everything- risked being hurt and rejected and having their message misinterpreted but still poured their soul out- open and bare for everyone to see. Because what good does it do to keep it in? And how can anything ever change if you <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/hollow\/\">pretend it&#8217;s not there?<\/a> <strong><span style=\"color: #993300;\">And how can we say we&#8217;re in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/fire-and-rain\/\">relationship with God <\/a>if we&#8217;re not honest with Him about how we actually feel?<\/span> <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">I realize I&#8217;m not as transparent as I&#8217;d like to be, even in writing music. It&#8217;s so easy to change what you actually were trying to say into a &#8220;more widely accepted Christianese phrase&#8221; instead of the truth. But we don&#8217;t get to\u00a0real life\u00a0by trying to hide from it or rushing forward through the hard times to get back to happy. As scary as honesty can be- I try to remember what it&#8217;s like to be freed- to be vulnerable, and pour your soul out, and then be accepted by God in spite of the badness. And I wish we all lived life in that kind of freedom. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"color: #993300; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">So how about you? Are you really honest with God when times get rough, or are you brushing over the things that He maybe wants you to dig into and be finally healed from?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em><strong><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">Ecclesiastes 3:4- \u201cThere is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain\u2026 a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In truly awesome music, they&#8217;re not faking anything- they&#8217;ve completely risked everything- risked being hurt and rejected and having their message misinterpreted and hated but they still poured their soul out- open and bare for everyone to see.<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on wp_trim_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on wp_trim_excerpt --><\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/i-hate-christian-music\/\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">I hate Christian Music<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":397,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Watched a video making fun of Christian music and hated that it was so true... #johncrist","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,5],"tags":[36,17,3,35],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-medicine","category-music","tag-freedom","tag-honesty","tag-truth","tag-vulnerability","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/523476-6b1b54c8-3504-47bc-909e-9f34c87304e4-poster.jpg?fit=1280%2C672&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7N2dc-5Y","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":38,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":409,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions\/409"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashleytauriac.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}