Telos
Today I’m sharing something very personal. Not just a new painting, but also a piece of artwork in the form of a song I’ve written. Composing is a hobby for me. It’s also a way that I process what is going on in my life. Recently I was presented with a challege that forced me to the piano to sit and play out my emotions in the form of this song. For months this song has been loosly titled “Not the End”. Until this morning. This morning I finished reading Rachel Held Evan’s book Wholehearted. Besides the entire book being chock full of nuggets of wisdom (which I hope to write more about in the future), the last chapter is what changed my songs’ title today. Rachel’s last chapter is titled Telos. As she comes to the end of her book she writes about how the Greek word for end is Telos.
This Greek word doesn’t have the air of finality that the English word ‘end’ has. In other words, it’s not a dead end. To the contrary, it’s full of life, because it has a sense of completion and contentment. It carries the satisfaction of doing what you know you’re called to do and the fulfillment of being who you were always meant to be…..the end is never quite the end as we typically understand it; it’s only a beginning.”
And this is when it struck me that this post I had been putting off sharing was finally ready to be shared —but with an updated title—Telos.
It seems fitting that I share these two pieces of art— a painting of a road that is headed off into the sunset with no end in sight- and a song about how our lives are lived in these liminal spaces of in-between and not knowing how circumstances may end—at the end of 2021. We may not know how our lives will journey into 2022. But it is not the end. It is Telos…an end with purpose and potential…it is only the beginning.
The rough patches in our journey are not the end of the road. The hard parts of our lives are not the end of our story. They are just a sentence, or page or even a chapter. Just a portion. There is more to be written. There is more to be lived. My hope is that you and I learn to live in these unknown spaces with grace and grit. That we embrace the unknown and scary direction we may be in. Remember it’s OKAY to sit down and rest. It’s OKAY to put the book down and contemplate it’s meaning. It’s OKAY to pull off the side of the road and enjoy the sunset. This is Telos as Rachel puts it: “The telos of a human—your telos, my telos, our telos—-is to love lavishly and indiscriminately becasue we have been loved lavishly and indiscriminately.”
Enjoy the first ever song I’ve uploaded to soundcloud! Maybe this will be the only one. Maybe there will be more. I am embracing the unknown! Listen to Telos on Soundcloud….or watch me play Telos at my home—messy bun and all.
