Turn It Around

Turn It Around

TURN IT AROUND 
Got your knees down on the floor 
Conversing with angels again 
All alone with the Lord of all your hopes again
At the home of this madness
You patiently wait on Him to take your sadness
And I told you that I would never understand
But here we are, hand in hand again
The Someone between us has it written down
We’ll be the ones to turn it around
We’ll be the ones to turn it around
-Got my head down on the floor
Hiding from my demons again
All alone with the ghosts of all my chances again
At the home of this madness
Yes I shake and I wait on
Light to cure my darkness
And you told me you would never understand
But here we are, hand in hand again
Chorus: The Someone between has it written down
We’ll be the ones to turn it around
We’ll be the ones to turn it around
We’re both out of our time
We’re both out of our place
I’m about out of my Mind
You’re absolutely never out of Grace
Somewhere between us we’ll be found
We’ll be the ones to turn it around
-Been so long on your knees
But you aren’t here by chance
This is your song and this fight is your dance
Children been waiting for a true believer
Another generation spinning out of control
And the home of this modern madness
If you don’t pray it will soon swallow them all
We’re both out of our time
We’re both out of our place
I’m about out of my Mind
You’re absolutely never out of Grace
Somewhere between us we’ll be found
We’ll be the ones to turn it around
- Sometimes I wonder how you’re strong
In a world that believes you’re wrong
Lead me to that Light
So I can guide my hands to find my Sword
Lead me to that Flame
So I can hold you safely through the Cold
Tell me tomorrow and I’ll believe

All that you speak about this God
All that I won’t admit to me
Chorus:
The Someone between has it written down
We’ll be the ones to turn it around
We’ll be the ones to turn it around
We’re both out of our time
We’re both out of our place
I’m about out of my Mind
You’re absolutely never out of Grace
Somewhere between us we’ll be found
We’ll be the ones to turn it around
Turn It Around is about two people facing the same battles in life and feeling the same calling to fight the darkness in the world and in those they care about and in themselves. One is facing her dark night of the soul with an endless light and the other is facing his darkness with just the matches of his own thoughts and plans that constantly flicker out until the box is empty. He can either wander through the caverns of his doubts and fears until he is consumed or he can take hold of the endless light as well. The problem is that she can’t lead him to the light by her love or by her reasoning but only by her example, the witness of the life she leads, even when he doesn’t understand her love for the light or respect her dedication to it.
She only has her example of living by her principles and walking in the light when no one understands and nothing seems to change and it seems to be costing her everything and once that is gone then all hopes of reaching him are lost outside of a miracle. So this is a song about pulling someone up without them pulling you down in the spiritual realm, about giving them your hope without necessarily trusting them with your heart, as sometimes they can’t even be trusted with their own. The distance we maintain doesn’t mean we don’t care however, in fact, it sometimes means that we care more about some then they can understand.
There is also much to be said about spiritual stubbornness, the human insistence on escaping the darkness by running from the light until we just don’t have it in us to run any longer and the light finally catches up with us if we allow it to shine. Victory through surrender is absolutely counterintuitive, but also absolutely effective. We cannot have victory over the darkness until we have surrendered to the light, we cannot walk others out of the night if we are running from the dawn.
“Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” Proverbs 4:23
Turn It Around is also about being what the Christians call “Unequally Yoked” which is being with someone that isn’t walking in the same level of Truth or allowing the same measure of light in their life as the other person. It is an agricultural term for when a stronger animal is paired with a weaker animal and instead of them plowing a straight line together which could turn seeds into a harvest when the season came, the rows are crooked and the seeds never produce their full potential. The plough animals also wear each other down with the stronger one not being able to move at its desired speed and the weaker animal being drug along which serves as a parable for two people who are not compatible.
In the dark days that were my first permanent duty station when the 9/11 Attacks took place, my Dad died, and there was a failed engagement all in my first year on base, I was blessed with a friend from Tech. School being sent to Germany as well in my second year there. She was the first friend I had made in the military and I had tried to date her (back when I believed in dating). She always refused because I was a long ways from walking with the Creator at that point, and during out year apart during where she was in elsewhere In Europe and I was in Germany for the first year, I drifted further than I had ever been.
Even after all of this, we were still really good friends when she got to Germany and for a while knowing her was helping to pull me closer to faith because she was always at Church of some kind and I was always with her. I also loved talking about the Bible, from a Cultural and Historical perspective, but not from the basis of a God who ‘supposedly” loves everyone, despite declaring that He “loved Jacob and hated Esau”, which would require some of us being an Esau in Malachi Chapter 1 and Paul’s writings. Years later I would be shown that Esau was hated because he scorned all his own birthright, he hated all of his blessings. He treated as trash what he was blessed with in the Law of the Creator he hated. She also had Christian friends, Christian books, Christian music that were all very new to me.
I had never really been around the Christian sub-culture for any extended period of time before except learning Greek from a retired Missionary and going to Church for about a month as a teenager and my mom taking us when I was a child and a week at a Pentecostal Summer Camp that someone had sponsored my brother and I to attend, and a weekend with my Great Aunt. So my exposure to Christian Sub-Culture (Churchianity) was a sprinkling and not a full immersion which has been both a burden and a blessing throughout my years. This very shameful chapter in my life still pains me so much to remember that it took me nearly four days to write this entry. Pain however serves a purpose of ensuring that we don’t forget the lessons that brought the pain into our lives.
The lesson here was that loving someone doesn’t mean they will be protected from your bitterness or your ignorance, and that asking someone to love you more than they love their Creator is to ask that both your hearts be broken because He truly is a jealous Elohim and because He designed our hearts to be covered in Covenant. The band “Imagine Dragons” has a lyric “I don’t wanna to hide the truth, I wanna shelter you. Don’t get too close, its dark inside, It’s where my demons hide, It’s where my demons hide” which could be the soundtrack of our relationship. Sometimes we can’t protect someone from the bitterness inside us and the most loving act of courage we could accomplish is to let them go to keep them safe.
After a few weeks in Germany we eventually became boyfriend/girlfriend, me the Gnostic with black nail paint from the trailer park from a hook up Dating Culture and her the home schooled Christian Girl from the Courtship/Don’t Kiss until your Wedding Day Culture with a Jars of Clay Poster in her dorm, who had never called someone her boyfriend before. You can imagine the value that I placed at that time on respecting what I saw as values she got from “rich people church culture”. You can also imagine how long her hopes for being preserved for her husband on her wedding night lasted with us being “in love” on a military base thousands of miles away from her family and friends, which is like college culture but no supervision as the military gives 18 year olds M-16’s instead of curfews and dorm mothers.
The emotional toll that took on her was very heavy and I simply couldn’t understand at the time why she was so upset about something everyone on base did with their boyfriend/girlfriend every weekend all over the dorms. Also what most of the “Church Kids” I grew up with did every Saturday night before Sunday, except for the rare few that I actually had a lot of strange respect for and that I had for my girlfriend for the first months I knew her. The closest I could describe is a new dad watching his wife go through Post-Partum Depression, but having no idea what was happening to the woman he believed that he loved, and also being convinced and trying to convince her she is depressed because people told her to be. When in reality, she is mourning for a dream she lost, mourning for the person she always viewed herself as becoming, and for the husband she had yet to meet.
We tried to salvage the relationship with me promising to respect her boundaries, and us ending right back at my dorm right like we were before, or me showing her “from her own Bible” where Solomon had 700 wives and God seemingly didn’t care, and later that it also says we should just get married since I was her first if we were going to do things Biblically instead of break-up like the Church say (totally overlooking the “What Fellowship can Righteousness have with Lawlessness” in 2nd Corinthians 6). She gave me books like Joshua Harris’s “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” and I dismissed it as being written by the mascot for the Churchy Homeschool Culture and her Joyce Meyer’s books as ‘Christianized Pyscho-Babble” used to sell books at Churches. As I said earlier, I was completely gone spiritually, gone to the point of one my best friends washing his hands of me, which resulted in me walking down the Autobahn at 1am all the way from Vogelweh Air Base to Ramstein Air Base. I also lost my Christian best friend that came after the first one was deployed, and the men from the Bible Study I attended in Germany after they called me up to give me a very strong and richly deserved talking to about my relationship with her, I lost a lot in that darkness.
So here I am 18 years later, writing an entry in my first book about the dangers of binding your heart to someone who is dedicated to their darkness when you are dedicated to the light, and also writing a book on courtship which will be a version of that Joshua Harris book I threw in the trash can of my dorm room but this one will be written for those like me who didn’t grow up in a Church in the Suburbs. Some lessons in life can’t be learned from facts fed to the mind, but by suffering allowing the truth to enter by soaking in through the wounds it leave in your heart. Today I have two daughters, and I would give a lot more than a phone call to a 21 year old version of myself if he were dating one of my daughters, and the perspective of a father, and also of someone who has been a husband, changes everything. Learning to really truly love has also changed my perspective on everything, I can even love now the people that I lost before I learned how to love.
So this entry is my apology on behalf of the person I use to be, to the people that I have known, the ones that I honestly thought I loved, and especially the ones whose love I could only accept as true if it came with both their body and their heart as it was the only verification of love that I had ever known in those days. I would also like to apologize to all of your future husbands for being one of the men who came before and took what was not theirs before you arrived to unwrap the gift that was intended for you alone by the Heavenly Father I repent to as well.
“Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.” James/Jacob 5:16

Prayer for Those Who Turn It Around

Creator of Friendship and Covenant

We ask that You bring hearts into our Lives

Hearts that will give Purpose to our Strength instead of Prey on our Weakness

We ask that You bring Hands into Our Lives

Hand that will Lift Us Up instead of Pull Us Down

We ask that you Bring Feet into our Lives

Feet that will lead us fast into the Light instead of further into the Darkness

We ask that you Bring Eyes into our Lives

Eyes that see the Possibility instead of the Imperfection

We ask that you Bring Ears into our Lives

Ears that hear only the Truth and not the Lies

We ask that you bring those who Bring Shalom

Because this World has not taught us How to Heal but only 

How to Bleed

“Two are better than one,

because they get a good return for their effort.

For if they fall, the one will lift up his companion.

But oy to the one who falls and has no one to lift him up!

Furthermore, if two lie together, then they will be warm.

But how can one keep warm alone?

Though a man might overpower one, 

two can stand against him.

Moreover a threefold cord cannot be quickly broken.”

Ecclesiastes 4:9 Tree of Life Version

Resource: www.coda.org “Co-Dependents Anonymous”