Leaving Badlands

Read these lyrical lines from the song Badlands and I will explain how I am packing my bags and leaving:

Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland
Got a head-on collision, smashin' in my guts, man
I'm caught in a cross fire that I don't understand.

But there's one thing I know for sure girl, I don't give a damn
For the same old played out scenes, I don't give a damn
For just the in-betweens,
Honey, I want the heart, I want the soul,
I want control right now

Talk about a dream, try to make it real
You wake up in the night, With a fear so real
Spend your life waiting, for a moment that just don't come
Well, don't waste your time waiting

CHORUS
Badlands, you gotta live it every day
Let the broken hearts stand as the price you've gotta pay
We'll keep pushin' till it's understood
and these badlands start treating us good

Workin' in the fields till you get your back burned
Workin' 'neath the wheel till you get your facts learned
Baby I got my facts learned real good right now
You better get it straight darling

Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king
And a king ain't satisfied till he rules everything
I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got

I believe in the love that you gave me
I believe in the faith that could save me
I believe in the hope and I pray that some day
It may raise me above these

CHORUS

BRIDGE
For the ones who had a notion,
a notion deep inside
That it ain't no sin
to be glad you're alive
I wanna find one face
that ain't looking through me
I wanna find one place,
I wanna spit in the face of these badlands

CHORUS
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I would say to the insightful writer, Bruce Springsteen, I have been living in "badlands" for far too long. I have tried to:
- work myself out of it
- deny that I am living in it
- distract my mind with gadgets and technology
- become cynical of those who seem to be living in "goodlands"
- and with much hell-bent pride and bitterness - believed and lived as if there is no God (or at best, he doesn't seem to have my interests in mind.)

While working the night before Easter this year, well really it was Easter morning after midnight. Anyway, God reminded me that if he can raise his Son from the dead...let me phrase this another way for the over-saturated religious minded readers, which includes me...if he can breath life into a dead man and make him walk, talk, and eat again, he surely can resurrect me and my family from the "badlands" where I live and created with walls of pain and hurt.

This raising of new life includes a bad job situation, declining health due to fatigue and lack of sleep, anger over losing a job/career in which I had spent all of my adult life studying for and doing, a family that has been struggling for a long time, finances in disarray, and general overall sadness of a pathetic path I have chosen or been given by God (I can barely tell the difference these days).

If Jesus walked out of the grave, not in the form a ghost, but as a living, breathing human being - then I will too will walk out of this darkness of misery, shame, and sadness.

I would say to Mr. Springsteen, "Bruce, like you I believe in the love that God gave me, I believe in the faith that He saved me, and I believe in the hope and I pray that someday He will raise me above these badlands...and oh, by the way, you are right...it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive.