I would love to drum for a career and I could do it if I focused my energies there but I feel this may still bug me; that drumming is fleeting. It may not always be fleeting for everybody, some people may feel like drumming is... well it just is... as in you don't feel like it is ever not.
For me it's not just with drumming that I get this feeling, it is with most things that I enjoy. You may know what I'm talking about? I also get this especially with surfing, in particular riding down the unbroken wave. The clean sensation of slicing along a wave face, feeling the power in the turns, and the synergy of forces all coming together. I love it. But, it is always gone.
You may also get this this when you hug your mum (which you all deep down like and if you don't I feel sorry for you), or staring at the sky, or sitting by a fire, or having a adventure with mates, or kissing a girl. All the same problem, all you have is the moment and the moment is fleeting. Fleeting; beauty and frustration bound together.
Is there anything that is not fleeting? I know there is but I mean is there anything in this life that is... It just is? Not was, or shall be again sometime sooner or later, but something that just is? I have found one thing, only one, that I do not get the fleeting feeling with, and forgive me for sounding sloppy but that one thing is this; it is being alive and sensing that God is there, somehow, wanting to be known. This was a great discovery for me, it may be total nonsense to you... sorry about that. It just is.
Fleeting? Not Fleeting?
Seriously. Ask yourself the question. Do you find everything fleeting? And now that you come to think about it do you find something that is contrastingly not fleeting, not always gone? I suspect everyone does and I also suspect that that one thing will possibly seem different or other to what I have described. It may be that it has to do with what God (If you don't believe in God just go with me) has purposed you for, or it may just be that everyone is purposed for the same thing, to be in the presence of God revealing Himself, coming alive to your heart, your intellect, and your actions.
I don't know what to conclude from this thought. Perhaps the things that are fleeting, the things that are not, find there right place in creating a hunger and pointing toward the things that are eternal, the things that are.
So when people ask you who you are. Instead of answering "I am such and such for here of there", perhaps you can answer "I am". Maybe this is salvation, that you can say I am (not that you are God) and not have to offer any apologies or explanations for who you are other than you are. You are because you are being characterised by someone that is, someone that says when asked who He is says "I am". I know it doesn't sound very helpful but think about it, being so free in yourself to say comfortably and without addition "I am".
Perhaps then it is a terrible sin to say of yourself "I'm not"...
Just a thought.
Jared Diprose is a graduate from Carey Baptist College in New Zealand. He has been a youth pastor, and currently is working as a freelance contractor. In his spare time he makes surfboards.
Jared Diprose' previous articles may be viewed at www.pressserviceinternational.org/jared-diprose.html