A Rush of Blood to the Head | Coldplay

      A Rush of Blood to the Head  |  Coldplay                                                            

release date:  2002    

         record label:  Capitol   

track
 listing:     1) Politik

                 2) In My Place

                   3) God Put a Smile upon Your Face

                   4) The Scientist

                   5) Clocks

                   6) Daylight

                   7) Green Eyes

                   8) Warning Sign

                                                                             9) A Whisper

                                                                             10) A Rush of Blood to the Head

                                                                             11) Amsterdam

“Open up your eyes…”

My New Year’s Resolution this year was to read the Bible, cover to cover.  I’ve tried this once before.  I came face-to-face with defeat somewhere deep in the bowels of Leviticus.  It wasn’t pretty.  This year things have fared better.  I am just now finishing up the first five books of the Bible, known collectively as the Books of Law.  As the name suggests, the majority of these first five books are lists of rules detailing how God’s people were to live their lives.  The Laws cover everything from what food can be eaten, to what material can be used to make clothing, to when a man can sleep with his wife.  Between these lists of laws, however, an important narrative is sprinkled.  It starts with the creation of the world by the spoken words of God.  It details YHWH’s promise to make Abraham into a great nation.  This nation grew until it is enslaved by Egypt.  God dramatically came to their rescue through plagues and the parting of the Red Sea.  Freed from their Egyptian masters, the fledgling nation of Israel went through a rollercoaster of up-and-down faith as they attempted to follow God through the desert on their way to the Promised Land. 

As a child, I remember being frustrated with the Israelites.  They witnessed so many miracles during and after their rescue from Egypt, but they struggled to hold on to faith in their God.  I was sure that if I could see just one of the miracles they witnessed, my faith would be stable for the rest of my life.  The Israelites, on the other hand, seemed to always be forgetting.  God led them through the Red Sea on dry ground, yet only a few days later the nation complained about a lack of food and water.  God provided a miracle – food literally falling from the sky – but this was not enough for His people.   Shortly thereafter, they grumbled about the choice of food God had given them – they would rather have had meat.  Ever-patient, God met the request of his people, but like clockwork, more complaining surfaced.  Moses left the people to obtain the law of God and, upon returning, found the entire nation worshiping a golden cow.  In terms of their relationship with YHWH, the nation of Israel seemed to always be taking one step forward and two steps back.  It drove me mad. 

As an adult, however, I find myself sympathizing with the perpetually unbelieving Israelites – mostly because I see the same faults in myself.  I want to be coddled by God; for the Creator of the Universe to hold my hand through each and every step of life.  I want Him to make my life easy, ensuring that I never have to wander in the desert of doubt or unbelief.  I cry out for His hand to touch my life, and when it does, I forget it almost immediately.  He works miracles before my very eyes, and yet days later I am grumbling about unanswered prayers.  I am as short-sighted as those first followers of YHWH.  Like them, I need a reminder.

For the Israelites that reminder was the Ark of the Covenant.  It was both a symbol of the presence of God and a reminder of what He had accomplished for them.  The Ark was a holy box; its contents, symbols of miracles worked by YHWH.  Inside the Ark were the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, a jar of manna, and Aaron’s flowering staff – each of these items, reminders of specific events in the history of Israel in which God had been intimately involved with His people.  Having such proof of the goodness and power of God should have given the Israelite people ample ground upon which to build their faith.  Even with these symbols, though, God’s people found it difficult to trust Him.  Brought to the brink of the Promised Land, they found their faith replaced with fear and refused to take the land set out before them.  The Ark of the Covenant begged the Israelites to look to the past; to remember, once more, how God had worked.  Taking time to remember could have developed, within each of them, the faith needed to step into the Promised Land.  Unfortunately, their focus remained squarely on the fear, doubt and disappointments of their present situation. 

A few years ago, the lead-pastor of my church encouraged us to create our own Ark of the Covenant by keeping a record of the times in our lives when we had felt God’s presence or seen His hand at work around us.  In times of doubt and questioning, our arks would serve as a reminder that God had been personally present in our lives.  It was a deliberate step to counter the human trait of forgetfulness.  I rushed home that Sunday afternoon and recorded a number of events on scraps of paper, placing them in a jar for safe keeping.  I found my “ark” about a month ago.  Ironically, after that initial afternoon I had forgotten to add anything to it.  I’m more like those ancient Israelites than I would care to admit.    

A Rush of Blood to the Head is the sophomore album by the now-internationally-known rock group Coldplay.  Recorded shortly after the events of September 11, the album hit stores in August of 2002.  At the time of its release Coldplay was not the success story that they are today – their first album, Parachutes, caused waves with its single Yellow, but it remained to be seen if the group would become more than just a one-hit wonder.  Receiving much radio play with its three singles In My Place, The Scientist, and the brilliant (yet vastly overplayed) Clocks, A Rush of Blood to the Head proved that Coldplay could be, and would become, a force to be reckoned with.  In 2003, Rollingstone magazine set out to name the top 500 albums of all time; A Rush of Blood to the Head was given a spot on that list at number 473.  Parachutes introduced Coldplay to the world, but this album established them as a permanent fixture on the landscape of modern music.  

Growing up, I listened almost entirely to Christian music.  Not until the last two years of high school did I begin to explore other genres.  I did this mostly in my car by surfing through the radio stations being broadcast out of Lexington.  In My Place was the first Coldplay song I ever heard.  I had no idea who the band was, but that guitar lick found its way into my head and I’m not sure if it ever escaped.  That song was one of the first simple melodies I learned to play on guitar.  Since that fateful night when I stumbled upon Coldplay on the radio, my love affair with their music has blossomed.  Five albums later, and the near religious experience of seeing live in concert, has only stoked that fire. 

I’ll admit, though, that it had been a while since I had listened to this album.  Doing so took my thoughts back to the time of its release:  August, 2002.  I was a junior in high school, with dreams of graduation and the freedom of college life filling my head.  I had just gotten my driver’s license and spent most of the income I earned from a paper route on gas for my ’95 Crown Victoria.  The thing was massive – almost boat-like; my friends and I named it “The Tank.”  I spent a lot of my after-school time studying; I was a serious student.  I loved biology, mostly because of my teacher, Mrs. Calvert.  When I wasn’t studying or running cross country for my high school, I was most likely hanging out at a certain girl’s house, trying to convince her that she did, in fact, love me (and not the other boys she was dating).  Church was a major commitment in my life as well.  A year or so earlier, the youth minister, around whom much of the youth group was built, had decided to take a position at another church.  He had always told me that I was a leader and finally, after he left, I attempted to live into that role, trying to bring some stability to the now-struggling program.  It was with this youth group that I went on my first mission trip to eastern Kentucky, patching a roof on a home in the shadows of the mountains of Harlan County. 

There is something to be said for looking back at where we’ve come from.  When I do that – take time to examine my past in light of my present – I can more clearly see the hand of God at work.  In fact, this looking back, for me, serves the same purpose as the Ark of the Covenant.  It reminds me that God has been present and active in my life and that, although I may feel alone at present, He has brought me to this point for a reason.  In fact, He promises to work all things for the good of those children who love Him.  I look back at that nerdy high school science student and realize that God was preparing him, even then, to become a high school biology teacher.  I was learning from Mrs. Calvert, and through my own experiences in high school, just how a life-changing teacher interacts with his or her students.  Years later, when God brought me into the high school classroom, I was ready to be used.  I have progressed quite a ways from those high school days of begging a girl to notice to me.  I have been blessed with a woman who daily teaches me what it means to be emotionally healthy and how a Godly dating relationship works.  I think it is safe to say that, in the dating world, I had to learn the hard way.  In high school, while I was trying to help hold my youth group together, God was using this experience as a training ground.  He knew that, in my future, I would be helping lead a large and diverse group of middle and high school students.  And that mission trip to Harlan County, Kentucky – it changed my life.  As I got to college, my heart was tugged back in that direction and I was able to volunteer for three summers with that ministry.  I made lifelong friends and grew to love those mountains.  Even now, I feel that God is in the process of pulling me back to that little corner of Kentucky. 

The finish line of life is not stationary – it is always being moved forward.  Just as I think I am finishing a project, a stage of life, an idea, I find that something else is waiting for me.  I am comforted by the fact that what is happening today will be used by God to build my tomorrow.  When I find myself in a particularly trying time, I must learn to look to my ark and dwell on the times when God’s hand was present in my life.  As my present becomes my past, I trust that I’ll be able to look back at these days and recognize the unseen hand of God at work.  As they say, hindsight is always 20/20. 

Where will my finish line be?  Chris Martin sums it up best in God Put a Smile upon Your Face:  “your guess is as good as mine.”  What I do know, however, is that if God is writing the script of my life, the future will be far beyond anything I would even dare to imagine.  For now, I’ll trust that today is one step toward that moving finish line – one brick in the future that God is building.