Music has the amazing ability to send you back to very specific phases or events of the past in a startling and very real way. I recently made a 400-mile trek from Los Angeles to the Bay Area to visit my parents and had one of these musical out of body experiences somewhere between Fresno and San Francisco (it all looks the same…). I sat in my car listening to the same songs on repeat until I thought I was going to rear end someone just for excitement and realized it was probably time to shuffle. I shuffled and lo and behold a song that I was obsessed with at exactly this time last year slowly penetrated my brain and sent me back to June of 2009.
Going back in time can be such a weird experience. Anyone who says it’s not possible has never experienced the power of music. Suddenly I was back in the hotel room that I stayed in with my roommate and her parents while apartment hunting for the place that would be my first home in Los Angeles. I remember thinking at the time that it was so strange that it was gloomy in L.A. in June. I remember my roommate’s dad making us move out of our first apartment because it was in the ghetto. It was. We were stupid. I remember calling my mom and telling her that I would need twice as much money for rent as she had promised if she didn’t want me to get shot; that might have been an exaggeration. I was stupid.
Life is so beautiful, so unexpectedly beautiful. Things didn’t end up working out in my first apartment; we both ended up moving out six months before our lease was up. I now go to USC but I moved to L.A. to go to UCLA. Never in a million years would I have told you that I would be living in a fraternity for the summer of 2010 and loving it. Never would I have picked USC out as my dream school, but it is. That’s what’s crazy about how God designs things in our life; he sends us all over the place just to remind us that he knows us better than we know ourselves. All 400 miles of my drive were spent just thanking God for the life that he has given me. There isn’t one single thing that I would change in my life. Sometimes I feel like I might literally explode from happiness or that if I get even one more blessing I’m just going to die. I realize that life is full of seasons and that struggle and hardship are probably just around the corner but I can’t help but just be blown away by the way God holds true to His promises.
