Least Likely

A few years ago I was getting a new apartment and I was filling out information for one of the landladies.  She was the mother of the two women who actually ran the business.  That day I happened to be wearing my "Gigantour" t-shirt so she asked me what that was.  I told her that it was a traveling music festival (a bit like "Ozzfest") headlined by Megadeth.  During that particular year it was also co-headlined by one of my all-time favorite bands, Dream Theater.  Also on the bill were Fear Factory, Dillinger Escape Plan, and Nevermore.  It was a really good show from beginning to end (unlike SOME Dream Theater fans, I actually stayed around for Megadeth) although I could have done without Dillinger Escape Plan.  The venue where they had it in Boston was not able to accommodate a second stage so the main stage was all we got, which was plenty.

When I told her who played, she wrinkled her nose a bit and asked if it was heavy metal.  It was.  She then told me that I would not be allowed to play heavy metal in my apartment.  I told her that I would not play it any louder than other people would play their nonmetal.  Then she backed off a bit and clarified that her main concern was that she did not want people having wild parties and trashing the place.  Well, I had no intention of doing such a thing anyway.  To me, metal is just music that I like to listen to sometimes.  It is rather astonishing, yet sadly not at all surprising, that many people in society, not just my erstwhile landlady, are so full of misconceptions.  In this case it's the widespread assumption that listening to certain kinds of music indicates the content of someone's character, whether it be good or bad.

The time of my conversion came around the late 1990s and then it was all made official during the Easter Vigil in 2000.  The late 1990s were actually a very difficult and very dark time in my life.  I did not need evidence to know this.  Nevertheless, the evidence was there when I was coming up with a playlist for my birthday party last year.  I made sure to include music from each calendar year of my life and it had to be lyrically clean - no bad words and no explicit content.  Basically, it was going to be my favorite clean songs from each year.  Seeing that 1998 and 1999 were rather rough years, I found myself having difficulty with music from the year 1998.  KoRn, Marilyn Manson, Monster Magnet, and Rob Zombie were the order of the day for me and my favorite 1998 songs by them were not clean while their clean 1998 songs just did not appeal to me.

Conventional wisdom would have deemed me very unlikely to be receptive to the idea of accepting the Lord at that time.  Strangely enough that was when I mysteriously became curious.  The way God thinks is not the way Man thinks.  He calls those who seem "unlikely" or "improbable" because it's the sick, rather than the healthy, who are in most need of healing.  The tax collectors may have been perceived as less "wholesome" than the Pharisees according to conventional wisdom but it was the tax collectors who were more sincere, open-minded, and receptive to the Lord.

Luke 5: 27-32