Tour Blog — Day 13

I was talking to Bemo earlier this week, and he mentioned some trips he’d like to make someday — floating the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, for one. The reason? “It’s one-of-one.” Not a trip you can recreate somewhere else. You can see the big city in a lot of places. You can see Disney all over the world now. But there are some things in life that are one-of-one. Unreplicatable.

I’ve been reading this book by Ernest Becker called The Denial of Death.

Don’t read it.

It’s a boring, wonky refutation of Freud’s psychoanalytical method. I’ve been batting around the idea of going back to school to become a therapist, so some light reading, ya know. Anyway, its whole thesis is that we are all creating these “immortality projects” with our lives that are meant to somehow retain our influence when we’re no longer here. The problem is that most people walk blindly through life and outsource those immortality projects to other people, society at large, or religion.

When Bemo talked about those one-of-one experiences in his life, it brought me back to this book, and I started thinking about my relationship with God. I wonder, am I living a cookie cutter Christian life? Am I lazily outsourcing the project of making my life meaningful to my pastor and congregation? I didn’t have to think long, and one of the reasons I can land so firmly on a “no” to both of those questions is New G.

Driving through Montana today was desolate — the kind of desolate where you eat lunch at 10:15 because you know there won’t be another chance between here and Glendive. Desolate enough that when the highway crews hit a stretch of road work, they didn’t bother with a detour. They just cut the pavement out and ran a pilot car ahead of us straight over a dirt road. Not a back road. Not a city street. A US highway, made of dirt.

My son Ethan — a bit of a loner, if you haven’t met him — said he’d love to live out here. When I asked why, he said, “Look around, man. This is the last place left on Earth you can shoot a man with a six-shooter and get away with it.” I don’t know if I should be concerned that ease of dueling is one of his criteria for choosing a place to live. Sounds like he’s never been to Skidmore, MO.

Turns out Ethan’s not the only one who found something to love out here. It’s desolate, sure, but it has its own beauty – Makoshika State Park, where we performed tonight, is proof of that. Picture the Grand Canyon shrunk down to a sixth of its size, packed full of dinosaur bones, and dropped in the middle of Kansas. Weird, but strangely beautiful; one-of-one.

I bet most of us could use that phrase to describe our own lives – weird, but strangely beautiful. I know the singers in New G fit that phrase for sure. We are all one-of-one, but we so often live like we aren’t — we go along to get along, fit into the crowd. There’s safety there, of course, and it gives us the promise of dissolving ourselves into a structure we can help support, one that will outlast us and give value and meaning to the lives of our kids. So, I’m not saying living in society or going to church is bad at all — it’s good. I think we were made to do it. But we can do it with our eyes wide open, fully in awe of the one-of-one life and relationship with God we’re building.

We sang in a beautiful amphitheater for about 15 people today in the middle of some state park that none of us had ever heard of. We have been on this trip for 13 days now singing on TOUR all across this country and internationally. My God, what an amazing privilege. My God, what a humbling opportunity. One-of-one. You don’t need New G to live one-of-one Christianity, and to build your legacy on purpose. But your singers getting to do New G tour doesn’t hurt their odds of living that kind of life.

Homecoming is so close I can smell it. I can’t wait to see Emily. It’ll be good to see you too, I suppose ;). But I have no illusions here – you’re ready to see your kids and you’ll run right by me to embrace your singer. That’s the way it should be.

Two more blog posts to write. I’m going to miss doing this. But I’m going to miss it while I’m sleeping.

Love you guys,

Joseph