January 2006

Last weekend my sister brought her kids up to my house in the hope of finding some snow. I live in the mountains surrounding Los Angeles, so snow is not an impossibility in January, only a misguided hope.

She works in Hollywood and spends most of her day in a small office with no windows, except the ones on her computer. Surrounded by people more concerned with their dogs than the people around them. Working tirelessly on music for soap opera’s, trying to convince herself she’s not wasting her life. At lunch yesterday, on her way to the commissary she went downstairs opened the door to an unseasonably cool 63 degree LA day, and found….snow. It seems that a scene set in a place that only exist on a television set, called for snow, so they ordered snow. You see in Hollywood you can order pretty much anything you want, no need to hope or to have faith. Surrounded by actors, teamsters, fake sets and fake snow, she’s off to lunch.

Six hours later, at home, she receives a phone call from a friend in Nashville. He’s a songwriter in Christian music, and quite a successful one at that. He’s been out drinking too much, and is on a street corner looking at his car. A wise idea not to drive but what to do. He calls a friend, just to talk and say “what an idiot I am”. It’s been a tough day for him as well. He spent the day writing songs with some up and comer he’s never met before, put together by a publishing company, in the hopes that they’ll click and write the next great worship song that will make them all a million dollars. A strange idea, almost as strange to me as snow in LA.

The parallels are not hard for me to see. But it’s a sad realization that Hollywood and Christian music are so much the same. Both are based on what we want to see, not any sort of reality. The dichotomy between who God calls us to be and who we pretend to be is frightening.

There is nothing more real than our failure to be. To be real, to be honest, and to be unafraid of being judged by everyone around us. That’s why, after all, everything is so fake in this world. We’re comfortable with that, life’s easier to swallow, coated as it were, with the sickening sweetness of lies.

There was no snow in LA last weekend, but don’t worry, they were able to buy some. Me, I think I’ll wait, until the sky sees fit to open up and pour out it’s own snowflakes, each one a tiny miracle, as beautiful and individual as all of Gods creations are.