Field Of Dreams

I used to dream of this stage to come. I used to visualize it over and over, how it happens and how I'll take it. Last week it came. Like a silent breeze it hit me. Before I knew it, I was through.

I'll just get this out of the way fast. Two Mondays ago, a day after my drums debut, I got an email. Well, the email I got on Friday, but I didn't find it until Monday. Tuesday I got myself an interview booked, and all this so far without ever getting a single call. Wednesday I got interviewed, a very tame and short one at that too. 20mins sharp. I came in 2pm, got out almost exactly 2.20. Crazy stuff, this was. The tame nature, my bad moves, and the briefness of it, all up I was pretty down when I went out of there. I wallowed in my sorrow by gorging into a huge Burger Fuel nearby. But I thought, yeah, another interview bungled, what else is new. So off I went, life goes on as usual. No news on Thursday so I thought that was it. Friday morning I got a call that I nearly missed, just a few minutes after I opened my eyes. "We were so impressed with your interview and I would like to offer you the job." How are you supposed to respond to that sort of stuff, two years in waiting and first thing in the morning? I struggled to keep my dignity and arranged to see them a few hours later to get my contract. It felt numb, it felt unreal. I pretty much didn't feel anything at all. No thunder, no great booming voice from heaven, no spire of light through the dark clouds, no nothing. Just a job offer on the phone and a contract to be signed, first thing in the morning. How's that for a surprise?

A week later, here I am. I have now tasted a glimpse of what it's like to work two jobs, which I still have to do for another week. In the three full days I was there, I managed to get as useful as logging phone calls for the last half a day. More difficult than I expected, to say the least. It took a while to sink in. Maybe it hasn't, even now, not fully. I didn't have much time to sit in awe and be impressed. I jumped straight in and absorbed everything like a sponge, and still I'm nowhere near being useful.

The day I got myself an interview arranged, I realized suddenly I gotta think through my shirts. I got very few shirts, and most of them were black. I also realized that this is a normal-hours job, so no more sleeping late and getting up late. At that point, a thought came into my head like a breeze, saying "Man, what a pain!" In reply to that, another thought came in. It was a modification of the Bethesda Pool story, and it goes more or less like this:

Jesus asks the crippled man sitting by the pool, "Do you want to be healed?"

Now, at that point in the story the guy didn't answer Jesus straight. Instead, he made excuses. "But Lord, there's nobody to help me into the pool when the water ripples!" Fair enough of an excuse, but an excuse nonetheless. In the same way I always say, "But God, nobody would give me a chance!" It was as if God answered me, "Yeah well, I just gave you one." And thus the story got shortened in my head into just two verses:

Jesus asks the crippled man, "Do you want to be healed?"

Then the man got up, picked up his bed, and walked away.

Don't make excuses, just grab it with both hands. You want a better life? Then work for it. The work is not just in searching for opportunity, but working those opportunities when they do come. Work 'em like your life depends on it. And so I did, and still do.

And so here I am, facing my Field Of Dreams. I used to listen to this song, Do As Infinity's Field Of Dreams, and watch the music video over and over again. Youtube has pulled them all off, but basically it's all just a bunch of black and white pictures of buskers on the streets of Japan, struggling musos reaching for their dreams, clawing and crawling every inch of the way. I resonated with that. We work and we work but we're not gaining ground, and still we call it our Field Of Dreams. That's the kind of desperate hope I had been operating in for a long long time. And now it's finally here.

It's crazy, what hope can do to you. The Book Of Proverbs says that good news is like good medicine for the soul. In my case, it wasn't just a medicine, it was a tonne of pure ecstatic Red Bull without side effects.

Until you've been in a similar position I'm guessing it's almost impossible for you to feel the magnitude of these simple words: It's. Finally. Here.

So what happens now? I'm just gonna work my ass off day in day out and find out later. A newbie getting a job in a recession, if that's not a miracle I don't know what is. Suddenly everything else seem small. God knows best, and I'm hanging by an invisible thread. This whole thing can only be described as insane, but if that's really the case then I'd stay insane for a while and see where this leads.

Funnily enough, despite the title of this post, I found myself re-discovering Linkin Park. And so I'll close this post with an attempt to describe how my heart and soul feels right now from one of theirs.

With hands held high into the sky so blue
like the ocean opens up to swallow you

Amen