Every blog needs a theme song …

Coldplay

Fix You

When you try your best but you don’t succeed 
When you get what you want but not what you need 
When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep 
Stuck in reverse

When the tears come streaming down your face 
When you lose something you can’t replace 
When you love someone but it goes to waste 
Could it be worse?

Lights will guide you home 
And ignite your bones 
And I will try to fix you

High up above or down below 
When you are too in love to let it go 
But if you never try you’ll never know 
Just what you’re worth

Lights will guide you home 
And ignite your bones 
I will try to fix you

Tears stream down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace
Tears stream down your face
And I …

Tears stream down your face
I promise you I will learn from all my mistakes
Tears stream down your face
And I …

Lights will guide you home 
And ignite your bones 
And I will try to fix you

Songwriters: Christopher Anthony John Martin / Guy Rupert Berryman / Jonathan Mark Buckland / William Champion

It was really pretty easy to choose a theme song for Beacons on the Journey. I think of Fix You by Coldplay as the soundtrack of my adult life because it is both incredibly melancholy and joyful–much like I experience the reality of day-to-day living. Unlike many of the more upbeat rock anthems of my youth (think Boston’s More than a Feeling), this song embodies the unavoidable pain that goes along with getting older, and hopefully wiser, but it also offers hope–literal lights at the end of the tunnel.

Life seems to come at us in various shades of black and white … sometimes very dark … at other times blindingly light … but most of the time in a gun-metal gray that mirrors my muddled state of mind that wonders WTF and what’s the purpose of it all? After all, we live but a moment and then we die, right? Living and dying … birth and death … these monumental events bracket the time we have to experience this thing called life.

Along the journey, we search for meaning, find ourselves embraced by Love but also experience pain, loss and moments (longer for some and shorter for others) of despair. I don’t know your situation, but I find myself looking for points of light … beacons of hope that are a sign that there is a rhyme and a reason. And that’s what Fix You is all about for me. When all seems lost, I look for the lights that will guide me home and ignite my very bones–the affirmation that someone, something knows and cares enough to try and fix me. Listen to the song again. It’s okay to cry.

With Love, Mark