Elizabeth's Matches
ELIZABETH'S MATCHES
Tore portraits off the nail last Tuesday
Cause frames hang all we see
Elizabeth shatters the face in the mirror
Answering the scars that go unseen
........Behind a perfect smile they hide
........Behind her smile she slides
Elizabeth lit all her matches
Built a light to catch her eyes
Consume all the walls that confine her
To a life that she spins in,
Doesn't live
........Been screaming but no one will hear
........Behind her smile she slides
CHORUS:
Burning down
Walls around you
Perfect portraits
Isn't really you there
-Unwrapping the sadness
You've kept a secret
Pulling all your matches out!
Elizabeth showed me her matches
In a box marked suicide romances
Filled up with guitars and addictions
Tattooed as a message to Dad
"Everyone sees her singing like a Cherub
On the front pew of his Sunday morning show
Nobody can see his angel's soul is lost in limbo
Forgotten in the message he sold"
Tonite she won't be practicing her courtsies and hellos
But watching the perfect portraits burn down
Said to me that beauty is like her cigarrette's
In the end its just plain killing you
After all the glamour and the music is gone
CHORUS:
Burning down
Walls around you
Perfect portraits
Isn't really you there
-Unwrapping the sadness
You've kept a secret
Pulling all your matches out!
Elizabeth don't tell me I'll find only ashes
When I'm close enough to see
Hold back your bottle hand
A little longer
And we'll be banging on your door to get in
Behind the smiles you slide!
ELIZABETH'S MATCHES, is on the surface a song about a preacher’s daughter that doesn’t fit into the “Sunday Morning Show”, but underneath that tried storyline is a deeper story that we have all played a part in. Each of us have lived much of our lives in places that we never truly belonged, forced on one level or another to play part in a show with a role that was written for us before we were born and seemingly by chance. We may not have been the preacher’s daughter, or the doctor’s son, or the trailer park poet or the housing project scholar, but we know these cages of tradition and towers of expectation that hold us inside this drama and with these actors who were born for their roles (though we were not born for ours). We also have this audience that has read our script and allows no deviations in the plot without a pelting of various forms of tomatoes that force us back into repeating the lines that were laid out before us, whether through baleful glares or long lectures or lonely nights or empty wallets, the show must and will go on, no matter the heavy price to the hearts caught inside the social machine.
We were not born into this generation by accident however, or into this geography, or into these genetics. There is something that the place and time and family of our births will prepare us for, and something that we will learn from our circumstance and also something we will teach. We were not born into a palace where we learn to seek our own comfort, but into a foxhole where we learn to accomplish the mission with the comrades and supplies and weapons which are available. This is our battlefield until we are promoted based on the merit of our courage and our scars that earn us the trust of others who need leaders, leaders that have faced the same fears and setbacks and discouragements they are facing. As the Wallflowers sing “Sending back letters from the wasteland home, as I slow dance to this romance on my own”. We all have something to send to the generation we leave behind in the place that we have come from, in the circumstances we come from.
“For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was laid with his fathers and saw corruption,” Acts 13:36
My own story doesn’t involve a daddy who was a preacher, or a doctor, or a script that required admission to a seminary or medical school or the military or a family business. My script involved trailer parks and factory jobs and county jails and towns without traffic lights, all of which seemed as inescapable as your situation. I’m not sure of what form “pulling all your matches out” took, whether tattoos like the Elizabeth of our song, or black nail paint and poetry books and music in the cd player that wasn’t taken from the local country station, but we all have our matches, our own way of saying “no, this isn’t my script, these aren’t my lines forever and this isn’t the part I will play the rest of my days”. The conformity can feel like a pillow over your face, making it hard for your heart to breathe, suffocating out the parts of your spirit that you hold the most dear a day at a time.
In my own life I have found there are forms of resistance that will set you free, and help you become who you are meant to be, and there are other forms of resistance that have you trading one cage of false self for another. We must become who we truly are, instead of just the opposite of the person we are expected to be, as sometimes we set aside the treasures of our inheritance simply because it is our inheritance. For all that I wished to have not inherited from my bloodline, the wasteland town I grew up in, and even from the empty years of seemingly not growing towards anyone I could be proud of, there are still some values and some lessons and some strengths that I neglected or rejected for far too long simply because of their familiarity which can breed contempt. Community and family and simple faith and learning to be content in any circumstance and so many things that don’t come with degrees and titles and salaries and honors, but are just gifts that come with birth, even into map dot towns and less honored surnames. When we pull out our matches, perhaps there is wisdom in not burning down everything that is familiar to us, but only that which forms our cage.
Prayer for Everyone Burning Their Matches
To The God Who Asks for Honesty not Perfection
We ask that you give us the Courage to be more transparent that Stained Glass
We ask that you give us the Integrity to use the same words in the Kitchen Chair as the Pew
We ask that we find Truth and not just Religion when we look for your Name
We ask that we find Love and not just Courtesy when we enter your Doors
We ask that you rescue us from our own Masquerade
We ask that you wipe away our painted Faces to reveal the Tears behind
We ask that you remove these Suites and Ties to show the world the Chains we Hide
We ask that most of all our children not hate us for the Rebels and Hypocrites we have Become
“I hate, I despise your festivals!
I take no delight in your sacred assemblies.
Even if you offer me burnt offerings and your grain offerings,
I will not accept them,
nor will I look
at peace offerings of your fattened animals.
Take away from Me the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll like water
and righteousness like an ever-flowing torrent.”
Amos 5:21 Tree of Life Version
Resource: “Beautiful Outlaw” by John Eldredge
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