Economy of Mercy

This one was written back when you didn’t have to try as hard to get an idea of the faith of Switchfoot. While the music is nice and melodic, the beauty to this one lies within the lyrics. It begins with possibly the most curious line(s) of the song, “There’s just two ways to lose yourself in this life, and neither way is safe”. I suspect that the idea behind this is you can either give your life away or have it taken. If you’re committed to making your life better by your lonesome, you may quickly fail and have this world chew you up and spit you out. If you give your life away, one can rely on hope of a higher power. The danger in this is your higher power may be someone like Jim Jones (the drink the kool-aid guy). But you can’t really sit back and not make a decision on anything, because that’s about the same as choosing to have your life taken from you. “Those who stand for nothing, fall for anything” ~Alexander Hamilton. This verse is tied off with the idea that you can hope for the future all you want, but “we are right now” (that’s from Needle and Haystack Life, which basically spends a song on this idea), so live in the here and now. What this means is not that you should live in hope of things to come, but rather in the present, where a difference can be made right now. When you combine this live in today idea with the idea of making a choice/giving your life away, you get a pretty powerful message wrapped up nicely in four lines of an inspirational song.

The pre-chorus (“where will I find you?”) leads right into the chorus in a clever way. This may have been unintentional on Jon’s part, but I think the first line of the chorus both answers the question from the pre-chorus and acts as the beginning of the train of that that is the chorus. In the economy of mercy/
I am a poor and begging man/In the currency of grace/Is where my song begins/In the colors of Your goodness/In the scars that mark Your skin/In the currency of grace/Is where my song begins. It pretty much explains itself… beautiful eh?

Second verse, queue the colorful analogy. This verse calls us, people, “carbon shells”, “dusty frames” that “house canvases of soul”, “bruised and broken masterpieces” who “did not paint ourselves”. It’s something that’s tough to describe, but something I feel very accurately reflects the state of the world. It’s like we were beautiful once, or like we have the potential to be beautiful with a little effort. But if we’re all dusty and bruised, who can help? After all, a broken arm can’t fix a broken house. What CAN fix our lack of color and goodness is the one whose goodness is overflowing with color and majesty. If only something in this song alluded to such a being. Well what do you know, check out the chorus, “In the colors of Your goodness”. I think it’s a pretty safe assumption to say that Jon’s talking about God based off of his background (and the pre-chorus). Either way, the analogy is that we’re grayscale and boring, whereas God has so much color that we can’t even imagine the extent of His awesomeness. We’re so broken and lost, whereas God is so wonderful that we can’t even understand. When you look at a plane in the sky, it doesn’t matter if it took off only 15 minutes ago or if it is at the highest altitude possible… it’s really high. Sure you can make an educated guess based off of how big the plane looks, but in the end, it’s really high. In the same way, God is so much higher than us that we can’t comprehend His goodness. I guess comparing dusty and old to beautifully colorful is Jon’ way of bringing this enormous difference of us/God to light.

The bridge basically states the idea I was talking about in the last paragraph. “I’m lost without you here”. “You knew my name when the world was made”. He transitions from cool analogies of color and an economy of mercy to the straightforward confession of being lost without God. In the end, aren’t we all? If you said “no”, I think you meant to say “very yes”.

Ps. I apologize for any grammatically incorrect use of any symbols like “ . , etc.

Faust, Midas, and Myself

If you’ve never heard this one before, you should listen to it, it’s fantastic, one of my favorites for sure. If you have heard it before or are just lazy, listen to the first three notes. They should tell you all you need to know about the general mood of the song. Eerie, dreamy, and almost sad, in the way that a rainy day is sad.

This song could be a novel. It has quite a story packed into a 4-ish minute song. It’s about direction, temptation, and internal warfare/struggle. A bit of background … Faust comes from a story of this guy, Faust, who basically sells his soul to the devil in return for power, magic, whatever. Midas is the king who turned anything he touched into gold. Myself is good ol’ Jon Foreman (the writer).

So the song opens in describing a dream where this guy follows him (the writer) home and is mad sketchy. He proceeds to offer (I’m just going to call the main character of this story Jon, whether it is about himself or not) Jon anything he could ever dream of wanting. The song then offers the statement, “You’ve one life left to lead”, introducing the idea of direction in life to this so tempting offer. Now it gets interesting. Jon describes waking up from this dream to a world where everything is gold… and it scares him. “I don’t think this is me. Is this just a dream or really happening?” Then it goes back into “You’ve one life left to lead”. Then it explodes, sort of in the way that some life lessons hit you like a ton of bricks, into “WHAT DIRECTION?” and “I’M SPLITTING UP, THIS IS MY PERSONAL DISAFFECTION”. Would you really want to have everything you touch become gold? Midas did, look where that got him; he ended up hating his “gift”. His food turned to inedible gold, and his daughter to a golden statue. It’s sort of like being mega rich but being alone… it’s not worth it. Jon realizes that if he were to embrace this offer of anything he could ever want, he’d be left alone, with only temporary pleasures to accompany him. The next verse continues describing a world of gold and how it’s affecting Jon, “I hated what I saw, my golden eyes were dead, a thought passed through my head, a heart that’s made of gold can’t really beat at all.”

Gold comes up a lot in this song, and it’s perfect. Gold is very pretty, and rare enough for it to be valuable… but what do we do with it? We look at it. To me, gold represents a sort of shallowness. Would you be happy with all the gold in the world? King Solomon had gold … sooo much gold. Did he stare at it all day long and marvel at his wealth? He used a lot of it to build a temple for God. It was a sacrifice of his wealth; the point being that honoring God is more worthy than any possible amount of gold.

“I wanted to wake up again, without a touch of gold” followed by a dreamy chorus of “what direction” lines. This leads into another explosion of sorts with “LIFE BEGINS AT THE INTERSECTION!” That is one of my favorite Switchfoot lines, I think I’ll come back to it later. This bridge for me is an awakening, in both senses. It’s followed with a wonderful verse, “I woke up as before, but the gold was gone. My wife was at the door with a night robe on. My heart beat once or twice, and life flooded my veins. Everything had changed, my lungs had found their voice, and what was once routine was now the perfect joy.” For starters, I like how the first time he said “I woke up from my dream”, he was actually dreaming, and this time he really woke up… at least that’s how I took it. We humans adjust to things. If the water’s cold, don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. We notice change. When you wear glasses all the time don’t notice they’re there until they think about it or take them off. When we have a good life, we get used to it and can find ourselves wanting more. In this song, Jon struggles with direction, and in the end, concludes that his life as he had it was the “perfect joy”. The end, awwww.

“Life begins at the intersection” is one of my favorite lines because it’s so simple and deep (at least, deep relative to how deep my mind is able to go). If you live a preset life, are you really living? If you only do things because they’re what society/peers suggest you should do … you’re more of a sheep than a human being. Life begins when you make a choice, when you decide, “that path is where I’m going to go”. If you just go through routine day after day, if you go through motions blindly, are you really living?