Music to make the happy

Listen to the above. Even if you don't understand German, I imagine it is a lovely song - I used to be able to turn off German in my brain and just hear the sounds, but I've evidently lost that ability. And marvel, for it is really, really good Christian rap.

As my life has gradually unfolded and new, unexpected experiences overtaken me, I've found myself to be mutable in ways that a younger Benjamin would never have suspected.

My relationship with my wife has been the source of a very large number of these changes, because she brings a quite different perspective into my world. The joy and challenge of that is, of course, a large part of why I married her. Without a doubt, the change in myself that has surprised me the most has been the softening of my heart when it comes to the subject of religion. I'm not sure that faith in any supernatural entity has a place to play in my own world view, but where I was once made very uncomfortable by anything related to God, I now very much enjoy activities like discussing theology with Rose and others who are deeply versed in Christian tradition, attending church services, and singing religious music in the choir.

Another realm in which I have done a... well, not a 180, but maybe a 140 or so, is hiphop. Growing up in Pasco, the only rap I ever heard was of the gangsta variety, in which angry young men with bulging biceps spend entire CD's exhausting the rhyming possibilities of the words "bling", "ho", and "mutherfucker" (my suggestion: "picker-upper"). The last two years or so, though, I've discovered that there's actually an entire world of hiphop that doesn't suck. And tonight, with the song embedded above, I have finally found a hiphop track that even Rose likes.

I just had to post this clip, because nine years ago, when I was all of seventeen years of age and fully convinced that I was a Grown Up Man, I would have scoffed at the very idea of ever liking Christian rap. And that silly, foolish little Grown Up Man that I was would have missed out on a song that brought tears to the eyes of the slightly Growner Upper Benjamin the first time he heard it.