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.