I've become "very musical" the last couple of years.
Lately I've been on a Bebo Norman kick. I have four - four!! - Bebo Norman CDs in my car (along with my 40 other CDs, spilling out of a torn old plastic bag across the backseat) and the past month or so I've been flipping between his "Try" and "Big Blue Sky" albums. (Right now "Try" is in my CD player. Fabulous.)
Bebo Norman is, since 2013 ish, out of the "official music business" (to which I say good for him) and is currently a Physician Assistant in Tennesee (to which I also say good for him). I only know this from my brief, bare-minimum, and very interested Googling. It's kinda funny to look at his picture on the hospital website -- Bebo Norman, one and the same as the much-younger and more dramatic-looking Bebo on my four (four!!) CD covers -- now pictured looking a little older and wearing glasses and a white lab coat.
It makes me smile. :)
An old interview of his that I found online featured him recounting how he had planned, out of high school, to go to med school and enter the medical field, but his so-planned *one year of doing music* turned into a very successful 20-year music career, which he eventually decided to exit due both to wanting to spend more time with his family and feeling the weight and daresay, at times, shallowness of taking personal, meaningful songs and stories -- and resinging, retelling, reperforming them night after night. The authenticity, the realness, even the power and the magnitude of those songs and stories rather dim over time of resharing them too much.
--That's partly paraphrases of his own admissions, and partly my own (sympathetic? critical? self-imposed?) speculation.
--Anyway.
I, a hopeless-romantic, ever-daydreaming-20-yr-old currently working as a part-time flower-waterer and part-time calf feeder, will keep on singing and humming and listening to my four and counting (four!! and counting!!) Bebo Norman CDs, and Bebo Norman, I'm sure, will continue in his "newfound" medical career for the foreseeable future. (For a while, anyway.)
Music is timeless, as long as we have record of it, or the tune and the words, or the memory of the song -- music is timeless, but our life circumstances at any given point in time are not.
Who knows where *I'll* be 20 yrs from now? (--Raptured, I hope.)
Who knows?
Will I still have my Bebo Norman CDs?
I'm sure I'll still remember his songs.
And it doesn't much matter where I'll be 20 yrs from now, because I'm not there now. I'm here. And right here, right now, I have my four (four!!) Bebo Norman CDs, which I am very much enjoying. I water flowers and feed calves, and Bebo does medical stuff. ;P
I believe God has placed both of us right where we are, intentionally, for a reason and with a purpose.
I wonder if Bebo ever hums his own songs while he's moving about his day. Maybe he hums other people's songs.
I hum his songs, anyway. They are a cheer and a comfort to me, and though I've never met him and I truly don't know Mr. Norman, via his songs, he feels almost like a bit of an old friend.
His music points me to One Who truly is my Friend. To One -- the only One -- Who is guiding me through my life by His plan, Who is sustaining and covering and holding me secure with His goodness, love, mercy, grace, discipline, and sovereignty.
May I never (if I even could) find more comfort in a song than I do in my Savior.
The only comfort in music comes from said music lifting up the Name of the Lord, pointing my weary soul and my lowered eyes to Christ, and reminding me that He is good, He is holy, He is gracious and merciful and just and sovereign, He loves and cares for me, and He is in control. He has been so kind to me and done so many wonderful and mighty things; He has been faithful, is faithful, and will ever be faithful.
We need to engage with God-centered, God-glorifying music. Too much music out there is blasphemous, heretical, wicked, shallow, self-centered. There's no room for navel-gazing, though I admit I often fall prey to such a practice, and it slips into a lot of otherwise very good songs.
I alternate my Bebo Norman -humming with hymn -humming lately, though as I've got Bebo on repeat in my car and not hymns, I'm more easily able to come up with the Bebo lyrics than the hymn ones. And that's not inherently wrong.
May we (I) always be quick to evaluate our motives, what we are doing, thinking, dwelling on, and why. May we make the necessary corrections to ensure we are living our lives in accordance with God's will for us as laid out in His Word; that we are doing our very best to live to glorify Him.
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Bebo Norman will never see this blog post. (I can pretty confidently say that.) --And that's okay. I deeply appreciate his music and am happy to know even as little as I do about him, and I'm sure he'd be likewise happy that I and the general public like me know only that little (--who wants a complete stranger to know half their life story?). So I am content (more than content) with what little I know of Bebo Norman. He is not defined only by his music (his medical career, at the least, proves that), but God has sure blessed him with great musical gifts, and I'm so grateful that he used them to glorify God and point others to Him.
May I do the same with the gifts God has given me, whether it be music or medicine or anything else.
God is good.
Always. 💚✝
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