IsaacShepard.com

I love to travel, to visit places I’ve never been to before. My travels have taken me to many different types of lands, some full of beauty, but some that remind me to be thankful for the beauty in my own hometown. Some cities are bustling and immensely exciting, and some make me thankful for my relatively-calm day-to-day life. Some destinations are quiet, serene, and desolate, helping me escape the troubles of life; they are very beautiful in their own way, but they also make me thankful for my friends, family, work, church, and community.

Just like traveling, music can take us to extremes and can remind us of the joys and comforts in the standards. We can praise the energy in rock-n-roll, pop and heavy metal. We can admire the complexity and beauty in classical music or the creative sound palettes of electronic music. We can get lost in the solitude of trance, discover amazing landscapes in soundtracks and orchestrations, or relate to the drama and emotion of country stories.

Where each of us calls home, musically speaking, should mostly be a matter of personal taste. But exploring the musical space and taking in all that it has to offer is a universal calling and can be life-changing. You might discover a genre that pushes your boundaries and leaves you wanting more, or you might come away being that much more thankful for what you call your own.

So, I encourage you in the next few weeks to take a listen to something you don’t normally listen to, and glean from it what you can. By all means, come away with a thankful heart for the capacity that God has given us to both create and enjoy music… thankful for the creativity, the variances, the simple, the complex, the quiet, the loud, the odd, the normal, the popular, the obscure, the old, and the new.