Guitar Solos Not Played

I remember making a choice that would significantly affect the rest of my life.

I won’t claim I made the best possible decision. It was painful, emotional, and the exact circumstances of making it remain pleasantly hazy in memory today. One of the falsities with which I comforted myself at the time was this: If you don’t go down this road, you’ll never know what might have happened if you did, and the uncertainty about what might have been will eat you alive.

Not sure why that reasoning seemed so appealing at the time, but it did, perhaps because it pushed me in the direction I already wanted to go. Maybe uncertainty would have driven me crazy, maybe not. I’ll never know, because I did something decisive. I jumped off a cliff.

Some good things happened, as usually occur when you make drastic changes in really bad situations. A plethora of bad things happened, as (if you know the story) was entirely predictable given the choices in play, and what scripture says about them.

The Point

What’s the point, you ask? Good question. One rock-solid certainty is that I will never know what might have happened if I’d made different choices; if I’d pulled up short and asked “What other options are open to me?” When you choose one option over another in life, the option you might otherwise have taken is forever lost to you. It’s not like driving down a highway where, when things look bleak up front, you can just do a 180 back to that last fork in the road and redraft your map or reprogram your GPS based on a new set of coordinates. In real life, when you drive back to the last fork, the former option has a “Bridge Out” sign posted and nobody is going that way anymore. When they do, they need a tow truck.

I have seen (what appeared to be) godly men do the thing they were supposed to do and suffer for it until the day they died. I have seen ungodly men do the thing they wanted to do and appear to prosper in the short term. I have no confidence the short cut-takers will have made the best choice in the long run, but it sure looks that way in the first instance. The other guys did what they were supposed to do, and they took a major hit for doing their Christian duty, at least as far as human reasoning can follow it.

So I can’t tell you what it feels like to suffer for righteousness’s sake. I can only tell you it didn’t look like fun.

The Beato Biz

I regularly watch the YouTube channel of a rock music producer named Rick Beato. Rick is a music scholar and a veteran of the biz. He teaches his craft to anyone who can spare a few bucks for a download and, as someone who was in the same game for a decade, I recognize he is really, uniquely good at it. Recently, Rick floated a video on YouTube that took one of the seventies music classics (Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven) and pondered what would have happened if some highly skilled guitar player other than Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page had been contracted to play the solo that fifty-plus years of rock fans regard as the ultimate rock and roll non-negotiable.

You know what? After thirty minutes of Beato noodling around on the neck of his Fender, I’m sold that, among others, Peter Frampton could have done it, and maybe done it better. Different is not wrong. Different is not a failure. Different is just … different. And if Frampton could’ve pulled off a more interesting and definitive version of Page’s solo, then ten other guys from that period could have done it just as easily. Let’s not even talk about Eddie Van Halen. He had that one in his back pocket if cancer had not gotten him.

The truth is that a story that seems inevitable in hindsight could in fact have been written ten different ways if anyone had been so inclined. The only thing that makes it “the story” is that people in it declined to go other directions. Nobody pursued the remaining options, and Page’s solo (which he probably whipped off in ten minutes in the middle of a world class alcoholic bender) was the one that went down in history uncontested. At one point in my late teenage experience, Stairway to Heaven was touted as the number 1 rock song of all time. That’s the generational power that happy accidents acquire when they are permitted to stand uncontradicted by anything preferable.

Rewinding the Clock

We can’t wind back the clock. We can’t fix the suboptimal or sinful choices we made in the past. But this I know: the song that has been sung could not have been sung otherwise. It wouldn’t have been possible. A life full of perfect choices made for me by others would be somebody else’s life, not mine. The Lord has graciously permitted us to proceed down roads that, for many of us, were less than ideal, and has walked with us ever since despite our moments of questionable judgment along the way.

I don’t know how to rationalize or analyze grace like that. I just accept it. God is merciful beyond anything we know, and his plans and purposes go beyond anything we can presently conceive.