Journey With You

I've been popping my old '80s and '90s Christian rock cassettes into my van while I drive to work for the last few weeks. These tunes (from artists & groups like Rick Cua, Petra, Guardian, Whiteheart, Bryan Duncan, Eric Champion, etc) take me back to the Golden Age of my personal faith. My teenage years, like those for any boy, were filled with emotional turmoil, confusion, and heartache, but it was above all a time of sending deep roots into the soil of God's love. My faith came alive, accompanied by lyrics set to synthesizers, and to this day this music holds a special place in my heart.

Recently I've sensed God's call to let him take me through some intense personal healing, and the song which resonates with this call is Eric Champion's "Journey" from his 1994 album Vertical Reality. The album itself has a Matrix-like theme of a small group of outcast rebels who are striving to resist against the massive pressures to conform to the society around them. Its principal characters are the Orphans of the Undergrid, who were orphaned in the War of Liberation. They are trying to avoid the all-seeing GovTrol which is constantly hunting them down, and are turning to the faith for which their parents were killed.

In this setting, the main character, an inventor named Sam, speaks of a fantastic machine he has built to help him find God. Check out these amazing lyrics:

I've got the hard drive modulated
And the tube gate on even flow
Inside the time-space continuator
There's a flux mount that's set to go

This thing is vertical, retractable, reversible, submergible, and jammin' it
And the mechanizing, cross-dividing, multiplying disk drive is jammin' it... is jammin' it.

Plug the main out into the AC
I've got the steam pre to heat it up
If there's a drive valve inside the time piece
Then the jam sync will lock it up

I've been building it, planning it, dreaming it, mannin' it and jammin' it
And if I pull a switch and nothin' hits I'll do it all again

Right now
I'd give everything I've got to journey with you
No doubt
I believe in everything you are, I'll journey with you
Take me

There's more, but the concept is quite clear: In his God-less age, this inventor believes in God so much that he is willing to expend all his personal capital to create a machine to take him into the next dimension to find him.

Some would argue it's a quixotic quest, and indeed such a literal machine would be a waste. What's important is Sam's burning desire for intimacy with God which presses him into actions which the world around him sees as irrational.

That's what I feel called to, and I look forward to seeing where God would have me journey with him.