The Unborn Baby That Changed History

Content warning: death, child loss, abandonment, family trauma, mention of abuse. 

 

I have long wondered why I can be so angry, bitter, and distant. After 2015, that makes sense, but why was I already walking with an emotional limp before that phone call saying my uncle had cancer?

 

The other day, while cleaning the kitchen, I got thinking about my first experience with loss -- so long ago and at such a young age that until this week I had not categorized it as such.

 

In 2000, not long after the birth of my brother, my parents announced they were having another baby. I was delighted. I loved my baby brother, and I wanted very badly to have a baby sister as well.

 

In the fall of 2000, my mother went for a routine doctor's appointment. The doctor could not hear the baby's heartbeat, so she was sent -- with some urgency -- to the local hospital for an ultrasound. In that in-between time, I was told the truth -- that they could not hear a heartbeat -- but I was also told it was possible that something was blocking the stethoscope, hence the ultrasound. This was explained so calmly and in such a matter-of-fact way that while I do remember praying that the baby was okay, I was mostly convinced that everything would be fine -- the ultrasound would find the baby safe and sound.

Someone took me to dance class, I don't remember if my mother snuck me over between appointments, or if my dad or grandma took me.

 

An hour later, I left dance class and headed to the parking lot. Dad was waiting for me -- Dad never picked me up from dance. Even though I thought it was perfectly logical that Mom was still in her appointment, I knew somewhere in my soul that the baby was not okay.

 

I don't remember when or how it was explained to me -- probably on the car ride. But there was no sugarcoating (even as a child, I hated it when people danced around an issue, and my parents largely respected that). The baby, at 17 weeks, was dead. When I asked if the baby was going to stay in my mother's 'tummy,' Dad explained she would have the baby like normal (I was familiar with the concept from my brother's birth), only it wouldn't be alive when it came out. He also told me that would probably happen that night or the next morning, not in the springtime like it was supposed to.

 

I saw my mother only for a few seconds when we got home. She looked terrible (she usually did when she was pregnant -- she never had a single easy pregnancy, and it was only another year or so before I started to wonder why she kept putting herself through all that awfulness). She retreated quickly back to my parents' bedroom, and Dad put us kids to bed.

 

I don't remember much of the next morning. Dad told us (or at least me) that the baby had been delivered the night before. I don't remember if Mom was there at all.

 

I do remember over the following weeks how Dad would occasionally check in with me about it, to see how I was feeling about it. While I was old enough to understand death and emotionally connected enough to know I was sad, I didn't have the vocabulary or emotional awareness to go much deeper than that. He shared with me that he was sad and upset too. He also told us how his mother had also lost a pregnancy when he was young. He invited my grandparents over for coffee one night to talk about it. My grandmother shared that she had actually lost two -- news that surprised even my dad. She told the stories of both losses. Knowing her, she probably offered a lot of comfort and cried with my parents, but I don't actually remember that.

 

A few months later, my parents announced that they were expecting again. The doctors kept a much closer eye on her this time, but things progressed well.

At her 16 week checkup, the baby had a strong heartbeat and was moving well. At 17 weeks, my mother went to her doctor's appointment. The details in my memory aren't nearly as clear. But I remember her saying she hadn't felt the baby move in a couple of days, and then somehow I heard that this baby, too, had died.

 

In retrospect, this was the one that altered my mother forever.

 

I didn't realise that till this week, in 2025. I had wondered for years what had happened to the fun, kind, gentle woman who raised my sister and me, who took us to the library and baked cookies with us and showed us which blades of grass made the best whistles, why suddenly she was replaced by this screaming ball of rage with an absolutely hair-trigger temper. I'm shocked I didn't make this connection before.

 

The next few months were a whirlwind of specialists appointments as the doctors tried to figure out how my mother lost two pregnancies at 17 weeks within six months of each other after having three perfectly healthy children -- the youngest of whom was barely a year old. We, the living children, spent more time at my grandparents' and my aunt's house than we did at home, and as the oldest, I was in charge of my two younger siblings. My parents became strangers to me. After the first loss, my parents had held space for our emotions even while they were openly processing their own. After the second one, they disappeared. I lost them too when that second baby died.

 

By the time my mother's violent morning sickness started again, she was broken and terrified. She tried to hide it, but there was no hiding her symptoms. At eight years old, I was already a veteran of spotting morning sickness. I called her out, and she swore me to secrecy until she was past the 17-week mark. I kept that secret, and it worked... that baby is my little sister, and she is entering her third year of college.

 

It was around this time, I realise now, that the rage set in. She had always been opinionated and a bit fiery (I had to get it from somewhere), but after my rainbow-baby sister was born, my mother would scream bloody murder at anything that moved. In a house of four children under ten, there were a lot of things that moved. I remember writing in my diary many, many times how she would scream at us if we breathed too loudly. I spent the remainder of my childhood trying to figure out the triggers that would set off her screaming rages, but never succeeded in cataloguing them all. Seven months after my sister was born, I developed depression.

 

It's obvious now that that depression came as a direct result of the loss, abandonment, and verbal abuse from those three years. I still suffer with depression today. It has impacted my education, my friendships, my decision-making, my career (both of the ones that I straddle independently), my faith, my hobbies, and my marriage. If the depression doesn't kill me directly in the end, it will still be etched on my heart when it stops.

 

My mother's rages continued until I left for college at age twenty. My youngest sibling at that time was three years old. That was the longest my mother had ever not been pregnant since before she was pregnant with my brother, the one before the miscarriages. My entire teen years had been a cycle of violent morning sickness; long, dramatic, difficult deliveries, and white-hot rage -- all of it hers. I raised all the post-miscarriage siblings because my mother was either too sick or too angry to do it herself and I couldn't bring myself to let those helpless babies suffer for something that wasn't their fault. I'm still not convinced it's a coincidence that the baby factory stopped when I left home.

 

Thinking back on all of this, it's not as much of a surprise why I all but stopped being human after my cousin died. Something in my soul remembered the deaths of those young babies all those years before and remembered how I was left alone, overburdened, and screamed at for every. single. misstep for a full decade in the wake of those losses, and it knew I could not go through that again.

 

This fall is will be 25 years since that first baby died and my life was irrevocably changed for the worse. I don't know what I can do at this point. Knowing why my mother's behaviour shifted so suddenly is helpful, but it doesn't take away the pain of having to choose which of my siblings to shield with my own body and which ones to leave exposed to my mother's rage -- whose cries I had to listen to helplessly as I was only so big and couldn't protect them all at the same time. It doesn't change the fact that my sister and I have basically no relationship because I prioritised the younger, weaker siblings over her and had to harden my heart against her pain because I couldn't handle being helpless in the face of it. It doesn't change how I've spent decades feeling like I wasn't wanted and that my parents were desperate to replace me with the next new baby rather than be content with the ones they already had. It doesn't change the fact that I dissolve into wild, uncontrollable, suffocating sobs the second anybody raises their voice at me or speaks with the very slightest of harsh tones because all my hear is my mother screaming at us that we're all failures and how she didn't want us.

 

It's nice to have a starting point, I guess, but I still don't know where to go from here. 

Music Day - A Song In The Night

I'm surprised I haven't featured this one.

Silverwind was, vocally, the 'Christian' equivalent of ABBA, and I loved both equally. There's not a lot of call for soprano voices in CCM, and from the day I first heard this album I was enraptured by Betsy Hernandez's pure, clear voice (come to think of it, those are also the same vocal qualities Rick Florian has). My short-lived desire to be a singer was born then, listening to my dad's vinyl copy of the album I'm about to feature.

For me, this was a slow burner of a song. It was pretty, of course, and I could appreciate the lyrics even then, but I liked Forgiven better (ironically the one song on the album that didn't heavily feature Hernandez's fairy-like soprano voice). It was around 2016 when this song sprang into my mind out of nowhere and I spent the next eight hours choreographing the entire thing start-to-finish from scratch. I had never even thought about choreographing it (there were too many Daniel Amos songs ahead of it in the queue), but suddenly I saw the entire thing in my head, fully formed, and it was all I could do to write it all down before it was gone. It was one of maybe two dances I've made that I would suspect were divinely inspired. There were seventeen dancers, angels flooding the stage. I'm not normally one for angels, but that was what the piece demanded so that was what I wrote. This is probably one of the ones I would most like to see on stage before I die.

The song itself is written as a lullaby -- a rather more lush and fleshed-out lullaby (the song clocks in at nearly four a and half minutes long). It includes not only Silverwind's signature harmonies, but also a child choir. If you can tune out the oom-pah-pah-like bass line (I promise, it is literally the only kitschy part of the song), you will find a beautiful bed of piano work (I wish I knew who played piano on this so I can buy everything they ever played on), accentuated by some light synth touches.

There are several highlight moments here. The first is the second chorus. The first chorus features only the children singing the melody in unison on la la la, accompanied only by a gentle rhythm section. The first and second verses are lovely and touching but not overly arresting -- painting a picture of a frightened child singing a simple song to beat back the terrors of the night -- but after the second verse there's a short but hard stop and Betsy's voice, nearly a cappella, puts words to the melody that the children sang earlier.

Take me soon, O morning star

To the heavens where you are

Sailing on a silver wind

Take me where my dreams begin...

In recent years, I've begun to imagine singing this to any future children I might have. It's the only time I have ever really pictured having a child of my (our) own. But the angel theme that I suddenly associated with the song in 2016 is a hard one to break. It does make sense -- in 2016, I was still very much grieving the losses (read: deaths) that happened in 2015, including the death of my cousin at nine years old. And in the past year or two especially, I have developed a very intense longing for 'home' -- the heavens, beyond the stars, beyond the wall of sleep. It's much deeper than the suicidal urges I've fought off and on through the years. This is a pervasive longing -- not to die, necessarily, but to go to the place where things are Good. The words take me, morning star / To the heavens where you are (as it is sung later in the song) sometimes fill me with so much longing to go there that it brings me to tears. This song is a lullaby, but a very emotionally intense one, one with the aura of death.

The second major highlight moment is where is seems the song comes to an end. At this point, it's been a lovely but mellow lullaby. It slows to an ending with a repeated line and a cadence... then the piano surges into the space and a triumphant trumpet kicks off a repeat of the chorus...

The third highlight is after this repeat. The chorus is repeated again, but with the children singing a counterpoint line -- which is something you literally NEVER, EVER hear in CCM (yes, DA did it in Horrendous Disc, the song, a couple years earlier, but by then they were in the process of being relegated to the 'probably heresy' section in Christian music stores). It is absolutely otherworldly.

Title: A Song In The Night

Artist: Silverwind

Album: A Song In The Night

Year: 1982

iTunes here; YouTube here.

Shadows fade and then disappear

When voices rise up sweet and clear...

Dignity, Children, and Dance

I've been in the dance world since 2000. Over that time period, choreography -- especially for young children (ages 4-11ish) -- has gone from 'adorable' to 'sexy.' This shift has been so widely accepted that today's media (and consumers) actually call these highly sexual dances 'adorable.'

And yet... we are constantly seeing posts on Facebook and Twitter about how poorly girls and women (in particular) are treated. How many are treated as less-than. How many are abused. How many are raped. How rarely/insufficiently justice is done to the perpetrators of these crimes. How intelligent, skilled, creative women are widely seen as nothing more than sex objects. Remember #MeToo?

Who is giving off this perception? Why does this mindset still exist? Are we really doing everything we can to train our children to think otherwise? (Children are the future. Societal change starts with them.)

I won't pretend to know the answers to all these questions, but I want to zero in on something that is frequently a huge part of a little girl's life: dance.

In North America, it's fairly common practice for young girls to take at least a year or two of dance classes. And most families, whether or not they have children in dance classes, are familiar with competitive dance thanks to shows like America's Got Talent, Dancing With The Stars, Dance Moms, So You Think You Can Dance, and the like (to say nothing of the videos floating around social media/BuzzFeed). Even if your children aren't in dance themselves, they're certainly seeing it from their screens, friends, and/or siblings.

Every so often you'll see a social media post where a rape victim is wearing a sweatshirt and jeans holding a sign saying 'This is what I was wearing,' indicating that they were not dressed provocatively at the time of their rape.

Then look at the 'costumes' your children -- daughters, sons, nieces, grandchildren -- are wearing in these videos with millions of views on YouTube. If people in jeans and sweatshirts are common victims of rape, how much more likely are these vulnerable kids in a bandeau and booty shorts to get molested or raped? I haven't even mentioned the highly sexual choreography. And then we wonder why pedophilia is on the rise...?

The siblings and friends of the dance students in 2000 when I first began training are legal adults now, or nearly (and one need not be a legal adult to engage in a sexual crime against a child). There is a whole generation of near-adults who have been raised on a steady diet of child porn made socially acceptable by sequins, stage lights, awards, and clever show titles and distributed in plain sight through every cable hookup and WiFi hotspot in North America.

Western Philosophy and the Suicide Epidemic

To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA)'s theme for World Suicide Prevention Day 2017 was 'Stay. Find what you were made for.'

Before I go any further let me make it very clear that I ABSOLUTELY AGREE with that phrase. It's a very good theme and a sentiment I, as a survivor of two attempts, can get behind without hesitation.

But this saying highlights a problem in western philosophy.

Children are taught from the time they start to talk that the world evolved over millions of years, that everything is here by chance. They are taught that there is no God, no being behind everything they see and experience. Things just sort of 'happen.' There's no intelligent design or reason behind anything.

As they continue in school, they learn that morals are a social construct designed to restrict freedom (including that of the most horrific murderers and rapists, for the record) and the ends justify the means. They learn that there is no ultimate meaning to anything -- art, science, education, nature, life -- except what we, humankind, ascribe to it. They learn, through the abortion debate, through war, that human life is disposable -- that it doesn't really mean anything. They learn there is nothing after death, that nothing happens for a reason. That 'The Universe' determines everything by a roll of the dice. That -- when you boil it all down -- nothing really matters.

If we weren't even made/created by anything other than chance, this tagline -- 'find what you were made for' -- makes no sense. If we just sort of 'happened' for no reason, then saying we were made for something is a bald-faced lie.

But if that tagline is right -- that we were made for something... then we as western culture need to take a serious look at the philosophy we're teaching our children.

This tagline highlights why so many of us are of the mindset that our lives mean nothing, that nothing matters anyway, that the world would carry on the same whether we lived or died. Because that is what society has told us since before we could walk on our own.

From experience: A suicidal person is likely suicidal because they feel they have nothing to offer. (Those, in fact, were the exact words I used when I first told someone I was suicidal -- 'I feel like I have nothing to offer. I don't mean anything to anybody. No-one would miss me if I was gone.') This kind of thinking is rarely developed overnight. Rather, this kind of thinking becomes habit over years and years -- a lifetime -- of being told our lives were happenstance and we have nothing to offer. Example: the first time I remember thinking no-one needs me around, I was nine years old.

Nine.

And that thought percolated, unseen, gathering strength, until I finally realised at age twenty-three that something was wrong. For those of you keeping score at home, that's fourteen years of this thought pattern sinking into my psyche. While my suicide attempt might have seemed to come out of nowhere, the fact was the thought process behind it had been brewing for over half my life.

If I was just a product of chance, the world could afford to miss me. It was as simple as that. That gave me the excuse I needed not only to kill myself and think nobody would notice, it actually gave me a very good reason to believe that I was killing myself as a favour to those around me. I thought -- I literally used these words -- 'the world would be better off without me in it.' After all, if I was only a product of chance, then surely I wasn't necessary... I could very easily not have ever existed at all, and apparently things would have been much the same.

Were we created for a purpose or did we come about by chance? Do we have meaning as humans or not? Clearly the belief that we have no meaning is at least contributing to the high suicide rate. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be trying to counteract it by saying the opposite ('you were made for a purpose').

What if -- what if -- we told children this right from the start? What if we told them from the time they began to talk that they were made with a purpose, made for something important, that they are not inconsequential and not a product of chance? Consider the old saying: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. What if the idea that people are created with meaning was so pervasive it never even occurred to our children that their lives might not have meaning?

National Novel Writing Month, Day 6

Wrote a death scene for the first time since before that glut of death that was 2015. Last year's novel featured several offstage backstory deaths and one on-stage near-death, but nothing 'for real.'

Today I killed off my MC's mother. She was originally supposed to have been dead before the novel opened, but at the last second I decided to establish a relationship between MC and her mother first. I didn't think I was that attached to her -- I was barely 7k into the novel and I did literally no character development before I started writing -- but I haven't cried like this since the week my cousin died. Even when I killed the FMC in Kyrie (at the 48k mark) I didn't cry this hard, and I was much more emotionally attached to that character than I am to anyone in this current story.

I don't really have a point I'm making here, apparently. But it struck me. I didn't realise how hard it would be writing death -- any death -- after losing all those people like that.  I just realised as I was typing that last sentence that the MC is about the same age as my cousin was. It had never occurred to me until today that I hadn't written any deaths since then.

All I can hope is maybe that's broken my writer's block. I haven't written anything substantial since April 2015 (the November 2015 novel doesn't count because it was so forced), and even on this novel I was behind within two days. I started today at 5,200 words -- I'm supposed to end today at 10k and because of my schedule next week I had hoped to finish out today with something more like 14 or 15k so I have a cushion for next week because I will have to miss a few days (two papers due by next Sunday, plus full class/rehearsal schedule and three performances in two days for Remembrance Day).

Stats:
Word count goal for Day 6: 10,000
Current word count: 9,130
Oilers wins this month: 2
Free meals: 3
Papers written: 0
Papers due: 2
Loads of laundry done: 2

Power To The Young

Have you ever noticed that in all those Buzzfeed articles and other assorted Facebook-clogging 'news services' posts, they always emphasize it when someone is young?

'Amazing Six-Year-Old Sings Adele Better Than Adele.'

'Worldwide Ocean Cleanup Project Headed Up By Twenty-One-Year Old.'

'This Kid's Eminem Cover Is The Most Inspiring Thing Ever.'

Why? Why are you only good at something if you're young, if you're a prodigy?

This has been eating away at me for some time now.

See, the thing is: I'm not that old. I'm still in my early twenties. Barring unforeseen circumstances, I have another sixty or so years to go on this planet. So why do I already feel so much like a has-been that I actually have flashes of suicidal thoughts? What in the world would possess an intelligent and fairly skilled college-educated twentysomething with a close family and a good group of friends to even have the passing thought of suicide?

I feel irrelevant. Like I'm too old to be of any use to anybody anymore. I don't want my name on Buzzfeed or any of those other crappy 'news' sites (then there would definitely be some suicidal thoughts going on), but I want to be needed. I want to be able to touch people's lives. But I'm already too old. I expected to feel this way when I'm in my sixties, not my twenties. I literally just got out of school and already I'm useless. I haven't even had a chance to prove myself yet. I have nothing to grow into. My life is already over and I never got the chance to live.

Please... stop perpetuating this culture of 'only the young can be good at anything' and 'only the young are worth our time.' The young haven't had time to develop and perfect their craft and/or skills. The old have been toiling for years and know exactly how to get the results they want -- but they've already been silenced. We as a culture don't give them that chance. They have one shot of shallow brilliance at age seven and then we cast them aside before they get the chance to really grow into their promise. Look at... yes, I'm bringing him into this... Terry Scott Taylor. This man has been a professional songwriter for forty years. That's twice as long as I've even been alive. And while, yes, his early output with Daniel Amos (Horrendous Disc; ¡Alarma! Chronicles) was pretty freaking good (unlike most people's early output), you listen to later albums such as Dig Here Said The Angel (2013), the Swirling Eddies' The Midget, The Speck, And The Molecule (2007), or even MotorCycle (1993), and you can't help but notice a rich maturity pervading the entire project -- in the choice of words, in the choice of topic, in the approach to the arrangements, the musicianship, the vocal development, the crafting of the mood... everything.

Are we really so embroiled in hipster culture that we all want to be the first to discover the next Mozart and therefore are trying to promote younger and younger people in an attempt to say 'I knew of them first'? What does it do to the kids whose skill you're exploiting before it's ripe? What does it do to the older and truly accomplished who are consistently ignored? What does it do to normal twentysomethings like me who already feel like there's nothing left for us to give and so we might as well just give up everything?

Everybody loses.

And maybe this is why art is, in general, in such a deplorable state. There's no maturity, only tricks and explosions. And when art suffers, so does society.

Everybody loses.

Of Children, Death, and Healing

A little boy died in Ontario today.

He had wandered out of his grandparents' apartment in the middle of the night into a twenty-below-Celsius night in a t-shirt and boots. They found him six hours later, still alive but not in good shape. And tonight he died. A little three-year-old boy died. It's heartbreaking to think that twenty-four hours ago, his parents and grandparents thought he had another seventy or eighty years left in his life -- his whole life stretching out before him -- and now it's gone. And he died alone, lost, probably frightened, freezing in the snow in a minus-thirty windchill. No-one to hug him and tell him they loved him and he was safe. And yet he had two loving parents and two loving grandparents. How awful this must be for them. How truly horrible. Twenty-four hours ago they were a normal family with a normal little boy.

Tonight I was at a voice recital at the college and as much as I tried to focus on the singers, my attention kept drifting to the director of my program sitting across the seating area from me, holding his little girl on his lap. He had his arms around her, rocking her in time to the music, dropping kisses on her blond head at regular intervals. She was resting her head on his shoulder and I tried to remember when I was her age and size, sitting on my own dad's lap like that and suddenly I thought, Enjoy it while you can; don't forget this moment, and I almost burst into tears right there. I could not remember specifically ever sitting on my dad's lap. I was never really a sit-on-a-lap kind of kid. I was too busy doing something -- playing a story or dancing. I don't remember being little enough for that and I don't actually remember the feel of my head on my dad's shoulder and his arms around me, rocking me. I'm sure all those things happened. I've seen it with my younger siblings. But I don't remember it for me.

They provide translations for the songs in the program. There was one, some German piece from Brahms, and the translation talked about names fading on old gravestones. The gravestones read 'we were.' So final, so dismal, so full of sadness and regret for things that could not be regained or recaptured or relived. We were, but we are no longer. It is over. It is gone. And then something poetic happened and then the gravestones read 'we were healed' and I could only think of my friend Brittney.

Grieving her death is a funny thing. I miss her. I hate knowing I will never see her or talk to her again before I myself die. But I know her breathing was tortured here -- to what extent I don't know, but I do know it was labourious -- and now for the first time she can breathe easily. She died, but it was death that finally healed her. Yet that healing came at the expense of furthering our collective relationships with her as her friends and family. I'm glad that she is healed, but I miss her so much.

Music Day - Rift

This song was recorded in 1993. But in terms of mood (and genre), it could be mistaken for something from Skillet. Screaming, thrashing, rage, sickened disgust.

Title: Rift

Artist: Mortal

Album: Fathom

Year: 1993

Label: Frontline Records

Before I get to the links, PLEASE NOTE: (they say this at the beginning of the concept video, but I'm going to say it again here) The official music/concept video is pretty intense and a bit graphic. It deals with the subject of child abuse (in its many different manifestations). It's tactful about it and overall the video is quite well done, but it is rather intense and could also be a trigger for some people. (It's six minutes long and within the first minute there's a suicide by gun.) Please be aware of this before you watch the video.
The song itself does not make any actual mention of abuse. It is more concerned with the anger and forgiveness process in the victim, but does not get specific about how exactly the hurt has been inflicted.

iTunes here; YouTube (song only, no video) here. Official music video here (viewer discretion strongly advised).

All that said, the music video is very well done. It's quite a tour de force, skilfully weaving multiple angles of multiple stories, different perspectives, multiple concepts into one cohesive whole. I've read bestselling novels that had choppier plots than this music video. From an artistic standpoint, this is phenomenal. The scenes with the adults playing like children and the scenes with the adults 'frozen' -- they've never grown up -- and the children walking around them are chilling. I can't quite put it into words, but that's exactly what it is -- the adults frozen, caught in their ruts, and the children simply walking around, just waiting... waiting... waiting for something to change.

Ordinarily I would be appalled at the violence and dark undertones in the video, but in this case it absolutely serves the point they were making. It's meant to be a wake-up call, to force us to confront the issue and quit pretending it doesn't exist. The 'Christian community' would likely watch this video (if they even made it past the gun part) and whine, 'Why do you have to be so graphic? Why did you make it so sickening?'

Answer: Because you won't step in. You won't be a friend to the adults (and children) who need a loving, caring person in their lives. And this -- these horrific scenes -- are the consequences of your inaction.

You said you'd lift me up

You said you'd cover me

You said you'd nurse my cuts

You stare and watch me bleed...


***

All of the above was written about two years ago.

Yesterday, after having pretty much forgotten this song existed, I suddenly remembered and subsequently revisited it. Twice. And a different phrase arrested my attention this time.

Sometimes our broken hearts are healed
The moment we believe again...

And it was apparently important enough that they repeated it. I wondered when I first heard it why they repeated it. It seemed odd to me, especially coming after so much anger. But now I think they repeat it so that the words could properly sink in.

Sometimes our broken hearts are healed
The moment we believe again...

In the past six months, people very close to me -- people I love dearly -- have been involved in separation/divorce, developed serious cancer, been emotionally hurt, and some have lied to me. Two of the deepest, hardest-hitting incidents were within two days of each other. And I gave up. I had been praying for months about these things, and finally, when those two particular incidents came up back-to-back, I threw my hands in the air and said, "Why am I still praying to a God who doesn't care?" The fact that I was thinking this terrified me, but there it was. And I've been in a weird in-between state since. I want to believe God cares, but on the other hand I think, 'yeah, well, if He did care, He would at least show me He could fix this.'

In a nutshell, I have become jaded and bitter, and I can almost feel my heart hardening inside me. It is terrifying. And throughout the past couple of days there has been the question of trust -- you're bitter at this person for not trusting you. Are you really any better than them? You're mad at this person for having a heart of stone. Is yours really any softer? But still I fight -- "but You don't care that my family is falling apart and You won't let me help the ones here who are hurting!"

And then this song came, those lyrics. Did they fix everything? Heck no. But it offered a challenge, a burr on the slope of polished slate that I'm sliding down... will you believe again? Will you trust Me one more time with your heart so I can fix it? It made me stop and think. That's one thing that I like in music -- a lyric profound enough to stop me in my tracks. And it was perfectly hidden in a loud, raging industrial song that I was only listening to because it sounded angry and I needed to listen to something angry to match how I felt. If it had been in a Silverwind song I would not have heard it yesterday when I needed it. I was so upset over the whole state of affairs that slow, happy music was making me even angrier. Props to Mortal for tucking that observation in an angry song where it's probably needed most.

Childlike Wonder

Something clicked for me the other day. Why I do this. Why I want to do this -- this art thing. Creating things.

I was listening to Michael W. Smith's brilliant orchestral piece Glory Battle. I have wanted to choreograph this since I first heard it this past summer. I have blocking and theme all figured out -- all I'm lacking is time to flesh out the actual steps. But that day I was listening to it, trying to wake myself up so I could study. I never realised before how consistently that piece gives me chills. I swear I listened to it twenty times. I sat there on my bed for literally forty-five minutes and just kept hitting the back button every time it finished. I couldn't stop. I kept thinking, Okay, one more time. Okay now, last time. Now this really is the last time. But I kept hitting that button like an addict. I wanted to hear it again, see the dance in my mind's eye again, feel that orchestra again. Like a little kid watching his favourite film or playing his favourite song over and over and over again because it's so captivating and big and can't be experienced all in one go.

Once that little kid was me. And the song was David Meece's This Time. I could not get enough of it. It wasn't a 'kids' song,' but it absolutely captured my four-year-old mind. Perhaps it was because it wasn't a kids' song, deliberately dumbed down to pander to a younger mind. It made me feel happy and sad all the same time, and one listen could not sort through it all. I distinctly remember even as a child trying to articulate why I liked it so much, what exactly it made me feel -- but I couldn't. In a way I still can't. You can analyse the song structure and the theory and production all you like, but it doesn't explain why my soul seems to get bigger and simultaneously smaller when I hear it. It doesn't explain why the world shrinks and expands before me, why snowflakes seem to glitter brighter and yet so do the stars.

This is why -- or at least part of it. I want to give a little kid that moment -- that moment where the soul is simultaneously crushed and flying. Even if the old people don't care, if there can be a little kid that will watch this choreography on YouTube obsessively not because it's my work, but because it awakes in him a wonder and awe he can't explain away, that will be satisfactory. Emotionally, at least. (I do still need to put food on the table somehow. I don't know how that works yet.) I want to give them the same experience I had -- that sense of awe and wonder, as I build on the foundation of those who gave me that same experience. And then may the child go out and do the same for the next little child.

But is it art for art's sake? Wonder does fade. But that path back to the great artists of history that started with David Meece turned out to be a good one. From there I ended up largely in the hands of artists who knew that the wonder they create is elusive and fleeting and that it fades. They had already found -- and directed me to -- the source of the awe and the wonder that never fades. May I build on their foundation and direct the next generation of artists the way that those before have guided me.

Music Day

I had my favourite Christmas song in the world (that's available on iTunes) lined up for today, but now, after that shooting in Connecticut... I picked a different song. There's always next Friday.

This song may admittedly seem a little unorthodox. (But then, I'm not known for following the 'say-all-the-right-things-whether-you-mean-them-or-not' herd.)

I picked it, though, because though there is heart-wrenching grief now and I'm not going to deny that -- there is hope. That man did not escape judgement. When he killed himself, he thought he was off the hook. But instead he found himself standing before the throne of God. And God, the perfect Judge, judged perfectly. Make no mistake, justice has been served today, far better than even the best court on the planet could.

And as for this world, this terrible, broken world... it will be fixed one day. And then the tears will be stopped and gently wiped away, the cries of the children (and the adults) being hurt physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually every day will be silenced. Justice will be served in full. And the world will be right again.

Title: All The King's Horses
Artist: Petra
Album: This Means War!
Year: 1987
Label: Star Song
iTunes here; YouTube here.

All the King's horses and all the King's men
Gonna run down from Heaven from where they've been
All the King's horses and all the King's men
Gonna put this world back together again
Gonna put this world back together again...

Reeling...

I don't know what to say. My heart is heavy as I type.

We are now under a Nazi government.

Start a firestorm in the comments if you like, but you mark my words. If nothing changes, if God sees fit to leave us as Albertans in our depravity... I shudder at the thought. They have clearly stated that they will indoctrinate our children (can you say 'Hitler youth'?) and those children will grow up to lead our country in thirty years.

How shall they lead a country when all they have been taught -- all they will ever know -- are the perverted whims of a power-hungry, family-destroying, disrespectful government?

In fact, even now it is happening. I see this indoctrination in otherwise very intelligent and rational people.

The enemy does not lie in wait at our door anymore, he is already inside.

And yet we sleep...



Please, Christian brothers and sisters around the world, pray for us. We who see what's coming are despondent today -- speechless. This is a terrible blow. We are disillusioned and weakened by the shock and yet in the near future we will have to fight harder than I think any of us alive today have ever fought to hang on to our freedom. Please pray for our government to be transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit, that we will be strong in the face of what appears to be swift and inevitable persecution, and especially that we would be faithful in praying for you as you have and will so lovingly pray for us.