This Place is a Prison - Embracing captivity.

This Place is a Prison - Embracing captivity.

A few years ago I worked at a large rock club in town. It was the sort of job that if I were 15 and knew when I was 23 I would be working at a rock club I probably wouldn't have believed it. But perhaps half way through the year that I worked there I started growing bitter towards the experience. I know now that I was quite ideal and naive at the time. I've come to learn a few things about the music/bar business that I would perhaps fair better now but at the time I felt quite empty about the situation. Especially the cocain that was so ever present. After one really bad week I confided in my roommate at the time about a particualr situation which left me very disappointed and very lost. I told him that I felt like I was doing a prison sentence and told him I just wanted my "break." He listened to me, but as he often does, didn't act as sympathetic as I would have hoped. I felt partly that he didn't really listen or care. However maybe a couple months later he called me up to his room to listen to a song he had wrote. The original version was changed slightly to fit within another project, but the general spirit is the same . . . the inspiration he took from some of my feelings. . . it goes like this:

~
This place is a prision
these people aren't your friends
inhaling thrills through $20 bills
and the tumblers are drained and then flooded again and again

there's guards at the on ramps
armed to the teeth
and you may case the grounds from the cascades to puget sound
but you are not permitted to leave

I know there's a big world out there like the one i saw on the screen
in my living room late last night it was almost too bright to see
i know it's not a party if it happens every night
pretending there's glamour and candleabre when you drinking by candle light
~

I realize now that part of this song is sort of eluding to a riduclous notion that there are not actually guards preventing me from going anywhere, but part of the captivity that I felt was in my head.

I've been thinking about this notion of captivity the past couple days. I listened to one of richard Dahlstroms sermons on my iPod yesterday. It was about Ester and at one point Richard mentioned being captive and embracing captivity. This started me thinking about the times I've felt captive, like as described above.

Then I start to realize how much captivity is all through the Bible. Paul was in prison, Daniel in the Lions Den, Shadrach and all his homies got thrown into a furnace. Jonah in the whale. Moses and his crew in the desert, for 40 years!!Jesus himself . . . Then I start to realize that most of the best stuff, the best work, the best stories come from being in captivity, being held prisoner.

There's a lot more to be explored on this subject . . . it raises such notions as being prisoners to the world, but free in Christ. to take pride in our low positions. I must now read to be able to properly reference all the 'captive' moments.

but perhaps this place IS a prison, no matter what I try to do, I will always be a prisoner. But the point is what I DO with this captivity. Perhaps I should make these people my friends, love them and take pride in my low position and use it as strength.