Song of the Summer

For me, one of the best things about summer is the music that pumps through the speakers.  I remember specific summers in high school by the music that blared out of my little red Ford Tempo's windows.  I vividly remember my friend Jennifer and I cruising the streets of Huntsville, AL singing along with the Fugees and TLC at the top of our lungs.  This summer Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe was the song of the summer for a lot of people.  It took over youtube and inspired athletes to dance.  Definitely a catchy tune that makes listeners want to move their feet, but for me, the song of the summer is a much slower song by Thompson Square.  Much like Kelly Clarkson's Stronger the story of the entire song doesn't apply to my circumstance.  The song is about taking a chance on a romantic relationship, which doesn't apply to me.  But if I take the relationship part of it out and consider that it's about taking chances in general, the message does apply to me.  I love the chorus...

We may shine, we may shatter

We may be pickin' up the pieces here on after

We are fragile, we are human

We are shaped by the light we let through us

But we break fast, cause we are glass.

When I was a kid, I remember going to Frontier City in Oklahoma City.  One of the first buildings you used to walk past was the glassblower.  You could watch through the window as he or she used heat and air to create figurines.  I was mesmerized by the process occurring through the window.  In high school chemistry I got my chance to work with heat and glass.  My junior year, I remember having a lab in which we were supposed  to make a right angle out of a short tube of glass.  I didn't do well on that assignment because my glass didn't make a perfect right angle and when cooled and laid flat on the counter, one end was higher than the other causing the piece to be unbalanced.  I remember being thankful that I got any grade at all however, because several students dropped their glass, shattering it, and getting an F for the project.

With cooler temperatures today, the true mark of fall, college football, just two weeks away and school either already having started or starting this week, today has felt more like fall.  It has prompted me to spend a good bit of time today reflecting on my summer.  I took a lot of chances and made a lot of changes at a time that they had to happen, but that I was probably too fragile to make them happen.  My choice to share myself in this forum added transparency to that fragility and I've felt a lot like glass.  At times I want to tell people, "be gentle...I'm fragile."  But at the same time, too much fragility suggests weakness and it's taken a lot of strength to turn my life upside down the way that I have this summer.

I'm beginning to shine, although I may still shatter.  I'm still picking up pieces from before.  I'm still fragile, I'm definitely human.  I am allowing myself to be shaped by God's light that moves through me.  I'm still glass, but  am transitioning from being the small figurine variety to the bullet proof variety.  I've done a better job with that transition in my professional life than anywhere else.  I'm still fragile when it comes to my personal and spiritual life, that's going to take time and most of the time it's a day to day thing.  The difference between now and six months ago, however, is that now I have faith that I'll survive a shatter.