25 Songs in 25 Days: Day Three

A Song That Calms You Down

A song that has always calmed me down is "Cold As You" by Taylor Swift. This song is from her first album, titled after herself which was released in 2006. You can follow this link: https://open.spotify.com/album/7mzrIsaAjnXihW3InKjlC3 to listen to the song. The song is the emotional story of the downfall of a loveless relationship.

You may be asking yourself why that would be a song that calms me down. The piano has a lot to do with it. But the honesty of the song hits my heart in a way that makes me feel calm. It's a song that I have listened to so many times and I know all of the words. I often find myself singing it when I am sad and now I barely listen to the actual song because I prefer to sing it myself.

I am curious to know: what your songs are that make you feel calm and close to God and your thoughts?

Comments

Courage

Some of you have mentioned before that it can be hard to share our faith with our friends who do not practice a religion. Perhaps being Christian is something they would make fun of, or something that would make us seem different. I, too, have found myself in these situations, where it feels like we have to hide who we are. But what would true courage be? Though it can seem impossible, our friends might be more accepting than we first think, and perhaps we can change their stereotypes of what being Christian is. This is a form of evangelizing too: to teach others what Jesus taught us. The quote in the photo is by Brene Brown. If you have a chance, I recommend reading some of her work. Here is a link to one of her TedTalks where she discusses vulnerability and shame: https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability/transcript?language=en

Faith Development in a Secular World

Everyone experiences faith differently in their lives. It can be unfair to proclaim one's faith as stronger or more serious than another person's since everyone's relationship with God is different. James Fowler wrote about how faith develops throughout our lives and I had the pleasure of reading a lot of his work during my undergraduate degree. I found a graphic that summarizes his stages of faith development to save you four years of intensive study: When we are very young, our idea of faith is quite limited. We copy the things that our parents do, but according to Fowler, we do not really have an understanding of spiritual concepts just yet. Jumping to adolescence, one can see that in the struggle that teens have to form their own identities, they question religious values of their parents and communities. This is a normal part of growing up. We do this in many aspects of our lives, so it would be kind of strange if no teens questions the religious beliefs of t...

Development of Morality

*Fair warning, this post is different than our normal short articles. It is a paper that I wrote for my undergraduate degree. I hope you enjoy and perhaps think about some things that you would not have thought about otherwise* Development of Morality: Childhood and Faith Development It is not often that one hears or sees something that truly changes their outlook on life or their feelings about their purpose. I once heard someone explain that there are resume virtues and eulogy virtues. That is to say, that there are characteristics that people think are important in the moment, or in life, and then there are things that people will actually remember about you. Your resume virtues are things like being organized or always being on time, but eulogy virtues are things like making people smile and helping out friends. So how does one learn what these things are? How does one become virtuous, moral or build their conscience? It is in childhoo...

Progress, Not Perfection

Search This Blog