broken cisterns

If you know me well enough, you'll probably know that I'm kind of into music. And by kind of I mean I LOVE it. I love listening to it, singing it, playing it...you name it, if it involves music I'm interested. I often find my roommates or friends asking, "Hey, what's some good new music I should hear or who's making moves in the music world?". I love that. I love that people who know me know that I'm someone to come to for good music recommendations. It might even be a prideful thing but that's another blog for another day.

Now if you know me really really well, you'll probably know that my all-time favorite band is Switchfoot. They've been making great records for years and they're still going strong. I might even say they're only getting better as they get older, which isn't easy to do. The lead singer is Jon Foreman, an artist that I admire a lot for his unique creativity and honorable character. He's done several side projects over the years, some of which being solo EP albums. In one of his songs titled "The Cure for Pain" the first verse goes like this:

So I'm not sure why it always flows downhill,
why broken cisterns never could stay filled.
I've spent ten years singing gravity away,
but the water keeps on falling from the sky

I think a good portion of music is left open to interpretation for the listener, but more often than not lyrics are personal reflections of the heart and mind of the artist. These lyrics speak to me loud and clear. In this verse alone I find a message that has resonated over and over again through different periods of my life. Like I said before, I think a lot can be said for interpretation but what I think he's trying to say with these lyrics is that God is persistent.

The song speaks of God's willingness to grant us renewal and mercy regardless of our attempts to cling to life without Him. The lyrics tell the story of our rebellious hearts and God's persistence that tears down the walls we hide behind. We try with all our might to be self-sufficient, to find life apart from Him, shouting to the heavens, "Hey, you up there I can do this on my own!". Yet the water in our broken cisterns disappears and while we desperately look for answers He keeps the water falling from the sky.

I feel what a lot of people would get from this is God is faithful but I've never quite understood the theology of that. We are called to be faithful, to believe in the unseen, to walk by faith, to hope for He who is yet to come. God being faithful is a nice idea for some people I suppose, but it doesn't seem strong enough, at least not for me. I'm talking about God being persistent, so I thought it would be helpful to list some synonyms of the word persistent just to get a better idea of the point I want to make. Here are just a few: determined, constant, endless, enduring, perpetual, relentless, steadfast, and my favorite...stubborn.

I relate well to stubbornness because it's such a human quality in comparison to the other ones I listed. I wouldn't consider myself perpetual or relentless, but stubborn is definitely on my level. It might not be biblically correct to say God is stubborn because of this little thing called grace, but I am comforted knowing that all I cannot be, He is. He is all of those words and more, unimaginably more.

No matter how much I push away, fight, or ignore all of who God is and what He has for me...I cannot escape His persistence. It's literally never-ending and surely incomprehensible. He is on our side, he is for us, He is with us. Does that make sense? Some days it does, some days it seems like the furthest thing from the truth. We're not made to fully understand it, only embrace and live in it. Thanks to Jon Foreman for helping me understand that.