Undo me
Undo me
Tear away every part that I have built on my own
Undo me
Come strip me
Come strip me
Pull away all the years I've spent constructing all I am
Come strip me
Speak to me
Speak to me
My lips will silence every thought that comes parading forth
Speak to me
Blow on me
Blow on me
Whisper in the wind that brushes up against my face
Blow on me
You're the Tree that never bends or breaks, you never sway
Standing Tall with Branches reaching out to touch my pain
You alone blow forth the wind of breath and air I breathe
Abba Father, You are all I see and all I need
So I pray that You would break me down and tear me up
And I pray that it would never end and never stop
Let me start anew, and grow with you, abide in You
Tree of Life restore me to the days when it was only You
Ecclesiastes 3:7
"A time to tear apart and a time to sew together; A time to be silent and a time to speak."
This verse kind of came to me at the beginning of a journey that God was (and still is) bringing me through. I wrote this song in response to my desire to actually experience what Ecclesiastes 3:7 promotes. It is a beautiful thing when God tears down; for, in this process (I believe) destruction is not His goal - His hope is to build one up in truth. I love how 3:7 says that there is a time for this and a time for that - it allows for these seasons to be temporary. However, though these seasons are temporary, there are permanent and eternal truths that are learned and thus lived out.
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Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities clearly shows Ecclesiastes influence. The title is taken from the 15th century European practice of gathering together objects of vice, lewd literature, cosmetics, and other objects of temporal pleasure and burning them in a big fire in the center of town. In accordance with the theology of Ecclesiastes, the pleasures of life are to be enjoyed as gifts of God but are not to be sought after as one seeks after a prize, and once received are not to be tightly held. Life is fleeting and one's position and possessions do not make one's life. Christ also expressed this idea when he said that one's life does not consist in the abundance of one's possessions.
ReplyDeleteWolfe's famous novel is a pastiche of characters from New York in the 1980's, from the excessively self-seeking Wall Street bond trader ('Master of the Universe') Sherman McCoy, about whom the novel revolves, to his Russian mistress, his anorexic and aging wife, and the self-seeking civil rights activist Rev. Bacon, and the druken British journalist who writes and expose about McCoy. Each character seeks his own vanities, his own temporal happiness of position, fame, sex, or money, and each character's story weaves together to a growing personal catastrophe for McCoy and a revelation of hypocrisy for the others.
The style of the novel evokes the Vanity Fair literature of nineteenth century British society and appears again in a new novel about the go-go years of Chinese industrialization, Yu Hua's critically-acclaimed Brothers to which Bonfire of the Vanities has been compared: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100423108. The literary device of exposing the hollowness of one's objects of adoration has been used by others as well, including Charles Dickens, by whom Wolfe as well as Hua were influenced.