A return to song

I sang today...the first time in so long. Got the same response I've gotten since I was a terrified 8-year-old standing in front of 300 people: huge smiles, crazy applause, even some tears. One difference though: today, I wasn't on stage because someone had asked me to be there. I wasn't there because I felt like I owed someone to be. I was there because I felt something in my heart start to come alive last fall. I was there because something told me, then, to write my name down despite the doubt. I chose a song that you can't buy sheet music or an accompaniment track for...to sabotage myself? Foiled again, because God had given others the talent to transcribe by ear.

Today I wasn't performing. I sat on a stool, just myself and a guitar, sharing a space in God's presence in music which elates and heals. Know what was great? Instead of hearing, "Wow, you could be famous," or "Why aren't you on American Idol," I heard this: "Thank you." Over and over, I saw and felt their joy, their appreciation for me and my presence.

For the first time in almost three decades of life, I looked in the mirror last week, said, "I love you," and burst into tears. I want to believe that I could be whole and good no matter what mistakes I have made. I am looking into the darkest and most scarred places, frighteningly and hopefully believing that maybe, just maybe, my mistakes do not equal my worth. There's so much I don't know, about myself...faith...life. Was it always this simple: loving myself first, so that others might, could be all I ever needed?
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Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance. - Bruce Barton

I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer. - Rainer Maria Rilke