Within a week of each other, the world lost two distinctly different musicians, but musicians whose songs defined many people’s lives, from early childhood to teenage angst to adulthood.
I was borne in 1969 and remember my parents playing eight tracks of various artists in the 70s. However, I came of age in the 80s and I remember the first time I saw David Bowie dancing in the streets with Mick Jagger on MTV; Blue Jean was a favorite that required full volume. I listened to Don Henley’s Boys of Summer and Glenn Frey’s You Belong to the City. I would later learn that Glenn Frey and Don Henley were the Eagles and Take it to the Limit and Take it Easy would become standard listening fare during my many runs. There was nothing like sweat streaming down my body, every muscle aching and my mind screaming for me to stop… then Take it to the Limit would play and that last two miles suddenly became easy. It was and still is one of my favorite songs.
Where David Bowie was transformative, not with just his music but his persona, Glenn Frey was all American rock.
Yet at the end, all their fame, riches and talent could stem the inevitable: death.
Their voices are now stilled and while their music will live on through future generations who will live the story of their lives to the classics such as Changes and Under Pressure featuring Queen, or drive down long stretches of road with Hotel California filling the car with “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,” their song is over.
As I drove my son to his workout this morning, I told him a little bit about these two men and the musical legacy they left behind. I explained that for all their riches, they couldn’t take it with them. The awards, gold records, nice cars, planes, magnificent homes: they were all left behind. And now they will give an account before their Creator, as we all will.
Whether they believed in Christ is irrelevant because now they know if what they believed was true or false. And this saddens me, because I do not know if their voices are permanently stilled or will fill the heavenly choir.
At the conclusion of my conversation with my son, I repeated a saying I heard some time ago: “It doesn’t matter what day you were borne or what day you died; what matters is what you did with all the days in between.”
I told him that I believed in him and his dreams but in the end, it is what’s in his heart that matters. As we pulled into the school parking lot, I told him to live a Godly life; to live in such a way that other people look at him and say to themselves, “I want what he has.” To honor the Lord in all he says and does and to never forget the real reason we are given our talents… so we don’t end our lives thinking of Wasted Time.
“And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment, so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await Him.” Hebrew 9:27-28
“Like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be recovered, so we must die. But that is not what God desires; rather, he devises ways so that a banished person does not remain banished from him.” – 2 Samuel 14:14
ycharper 