Lyric Lessons: Paranoia In Bb Major

I really wanted to continue on through a few other songs from the concert of The Avett Brothers I went to the other night. As I mentioned in the last post, many of their songs could be twisted a bit to have a spiritual application, though this probably isn't too rare if one is just willing to look for applications. They played a few songs I couldn't get anything out of, but their fourth song, "Paranoia in Bb Major," has some aspects we could easily look at and learn from, even within the church.

As the title suggests, this song is about being paranoid. The fictional man in the song begins by telling himself, "I keep tellin' myself that it'll be fine, you can't make everybody happy all of the time." This really is something that almost everyone loves to tell themselves, yet so many times we find ourselves seeking acceptance from others, and if not that, worrying what others think of us and the choices we make. The paranoid man talks about finding comfort "with all [his] friends then [his] friends start telling me that [he's] always been wrong, and [he's] so tired of being wrong." This is probably one other major source of paranoia or worry for Christians today. We all want to be accepted, and we all want to be accepted by the people closest to us, yet we want to follow God in all things. Surely the clash between wanting acceptance by both man and God causes hard emotions to deal with, a comfort in friends that is soon destroyed by their thoughts on your beliefs that might be contrary.

It's just a matter of life that not everyone will be happy with the way I live my life, and everyone that lives can say this about themselves. The question that then arises is, "Who will you seek to please, God or man?" There are countless amounts of times in the life of the Christ where He had to decide if He would seek God's approval or man's. In every instance Jesus chose God. Even in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus showed a desire to escape the pain before Him, but knew that God's will must happen, not His desire emanating from the flesh. As noted in the last post, Peter was concerned about what others would think about his relation to Jesus, and paranoid about how they would react if they knew. We must also note that Peter ended up being the one recorded for preaching at the foundation of the church in Acts 2. We are not perfect, but if we are repentant like Peter and continue on seeking after God, we can accomplish great things.

We also become paranoid and frightened over what brethren will think of us. There are many within the church who are ready and willing to jump on and attack any brother or sister that transgresses what they feel is right or wrong. This applies to the area of scruples and not doctrine. Many Christians allow the overly aggressive, scruple binding Christians to dictate everything one must think, do and believe in order to be pleasing to God. There are so many times that we are tempted to please brethren above God and this should not be the case.

Before we conclude, it should be noted that this truth does not grant us the right to do whatever we please and however we please under the, "Well if you don't like it, you have a problem with God" excuse. We must always seek after God's will, but it does not give us the right to cause unrest and bring a wave of destruction on the church over something that does not warrant it, yet many do this exact thing. We must also remember that how we act before the world gives people an impression of Christianity, and there are many who follow Christ, but do so in a manner that keeps anyone else from doing so. Sometimes the truth does push people away from God, but if someone is pushed away from God, it needs to be because they don't like what God has said, not because they just don't like us.