This question welled up in my soul out of nowhere and set me on a search for “real” meaning – – that to this day, I am in constant pursuit of. I just can’t stop, and quite frankly, that is why I blog, preach, read and wonder. As Socrates once quipped, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” That is why it puzzles me why people are so easily satisfied with banal, trivial, and fleeting things. Unexamination is our cultural epidemic.

But who am I to talk? For the first 23 years of my life, I was, as C. S. Lewis wrote, “far too easily pleased” with the mud pies I was making and enjoying. That is until I saw Tom Petty in concert, where something was set aflame in my heart. It is not to be satisfied, now I search…

The year was 1985 and he just released the album “Southern Accents” which was enormously popular; especially with my friends who liked his quirky and odd musical style. Many people call his music “stoner rock”. I was asked to accompany four of my friends to see him in concert, and we were all really jazzed up to see him (cool 80’s lingo). The concert was in my hometown of Cleveland, and we made a night of it. I really don’t remember who opened, or who I was with, but I do remember when Tom Petty first walked on stage. The crowd went crazy when all of his 130 pound skinny, scraggly-haired, bony-kneed frame came shuffling out on stage.

All eyes were fixed on this singular gaunt man. And then it happened, the moment I will never forget, the moment that has been haunting me and causing me to question all the things we, as a society, accept as true, real, popular, and praiseworthy. Tom Petty, with guitar strapped to his side, approached the microphone, and grabbing it with both hands, looked out on all of us and said, “Hello Cleveland!” The place erupted, people went berserk, and my friend next to me said this, “Can you believe it? He said Cleveland? He actually said Cleveland!”

Right at that moment, everything went into slow motion: I looked around and watched all these people willing to bow in worship to a skinny, skeletal man because he knew the name of the city he was performing in. I don’t know how to describe it to you, but it felt like the very pores and fabric of existence expected, no, demanded of me to join in the adoration as well. No questions were to be asked, I was to offer myself in total submission, with all of my senses and reason, to the worship of someone who simply knew what was patently obvious to us all, “We were in Cleveland…Yes, a five-year-old could figure that out.” But it was more than this, I felt like a tiny fish caught in a giant school of ignoramuses swimming to our certain death because both the cultural current and our human blindness was flowing and forcing all of us that way.

I wanted out. I wanted to breathe. I wanted reason. I wanted to be a thinking man.

As you read this, you may be thinking that going to a concert and applauding a great musician may not seem like a life-altering experience. But it was for me. I was pushed out, forced to look at everything anew. In that moment of time, I was tired of being, as Pink Floyd says, a cog in the machine. And that machine was not, as we are fooled to believe, the vast imperial, economic, monster of American greed and finance. The machine for me was this crowd of blind, amoral, independent and ignorant humanity.

We all claim independence, and yet we all clap for a silly man who can say Cleveland. I started noticing this everywhere. People all think the same, react the same, get tattoos the same way, vote the same, get angry the same, watch movies the same, drink the same, look at porn the same…while we are all made to believe we are unique and special. All rebels, when in fact, when we are nothing more than reactionary robots.

I wanted more. I wanted that for which I have been designed. And I still am searching for.

That is primarily why I blog. People ask me, “Blogging on a consistent basis takes a lot of work. Why do you do it? People will get mad at you and you don’t need the headache?” I do it for three reasons:

1. REFINE both my thinking and understanding. I was told if you ever really want to be a better thinker, writer, communicator you need to go public. This is where you will be challenged. This is where your worldview will be tested. Anyone can write nice things when only his friends are listening, but try entering the fray with your antagonists. Truth can only be found when your fallacies are hammered at and found wanting. So I write not expecting much, but at least trying to get my voice, my opinion and perspective out there. Maybe someone will wake up and see that Tom Petty, and for that matter, the rest of our sick celebrity culture are all “emperors with no clothes on.”
2. REKINDLE the desire to search in others for that which is true, right, lovely and worthwhile. I am not saying I have arrived, but I am saying I have found that when you don’t follow the crowd blindly, you see amazing things. I also have found that “Faith” is the only way to see these amazing things – – and boy is the view and the rush of truth refreshing.
3. REFRAME the way we see God. I have found him, or should I say, in my search, he has found me. I am convinced, God was the one that slowed time down in order to wake me up at the Tom Petty concert. He helped me to see how the “herd of humanity” is being led to the slaughter…and he is nothing like the weak, silly little god I imagined him to be. I think Os Guinness is right, “In short, sin frames God falsely. Thinking of him as he isn’t, sin justifies itself in rejecting him as he is…The simple fact is that time and again unbelievers disbelieve in a god that we don’t believe in either, a god who isn’t like God at all, and a god that we could never believe in a hundred years.”

So now I search, but I know what I am searching for. And I also have come to see that the crowd doesn’t. For the most part they are caught up with chasing the shadows of entertainment, celebrity, political correctness, 401k balances, a cottage on the lake, fighting for the rights to sleep with who you want, kill human beings that are still in their mother’s wombs, stopping terrorism, and trying to figure out how to lynch both Hillary and Donald on the same gallows. We are caught up and obsessed with secondary things…

Chasing shadows, making mud pies, adoring a man who knows what city he is in — there is sooooo much more to the world than this.

I will concede one thing to Tom Petty, he was right when he said, “Don’t come around here no more. I’ve given up…” I have given up finding answers in the crowd. I have stopped going to the same old haunts of drink, debauchery, and popular sentiment that everyone else has set up camp at. I have found a new road, much narrower and yet much more wild and alive. Harder to follow, but easier to fall in love with. Difficult to fully grasp but when touched, even for a second, it is tastier, sweeter, lovelier than anything I have ever experienced.

And I have found some better song lyrics written by a more insightful songwriter than Tom Petty, and his name is Isaiah…