If you don't already have them...

Here's how you can download my best two albums for free: 

1. Go to http://jasonharwell.bandcamp.com

2. Choose an album.

3. Click "download" and choose your preferred file type (mp3, FLAC, etc.)

4. Drag downloaded file folder into your iTunes library (or whatever you use to keep a music library)

5. Enjoy!

 

That's all there is to it. Now, if you've got your heart set on buying some music, you can always get these recordings online at any digital service. You're also incredibly awesome. That will help me pay off some new studio equipment that is currently helping the Warm Fuzzies make new recordings (as well as finishing some of my own newer recordings).

But since I'm giving you this for free, you're supposed to be guilt-free.

 

Thanks for listening!

jason

Posted via email from JasonHarwell.com

Jana.

As I alluded to a couple of days ago, today is my eighth wedding anniversary with my lovely wife, Jana, and four of them have been the happiest years of my life (that's a joke, people. My father-in-law used to use that one a good bit, and it never gets old). 

Much like a lot of things I've noticed as I've gotten older, the last eight years seem to be simultaneously a moment and an eternity. Weird how that happens. In that time we've had our share of adventures, and I am continually grateful to be with her as we find our share of new ones.

I am often reminded of something profound that Jana and I read during our pre-marital counseling from the book, A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Van Auken. I passed the book along a few years ago, so I don't have an exact quote, but the gist of the passage was this - that it's actually quite easy to destroy a marriage, and negligence is the most dangerous assassin. Van Auken spoke of his own marriage, about how he and his wife dedicated themselves to each other's interests in order that they may avoid what he called the "creeping separateness." It boiled down to a simple truth, that each day a married couple will either choose to take a small step toward one another or a small step away. The application is that if we're not careful, we can easily erode our own marriages by slowly and surely drifting apart from one another.

That particular part of the book is ingrained in my consciousness. With the increasing amounts of things out there to entertain us, it is very easy to drift apart. I'm not going to criticize anyone for playing video games, but there is a hard reality for someone who spends hours alone playing games online by himself. The Van Aukens of A Severe Mercy figured that surrendering all the things you love to do (i.e., playing video games) wasn't really all that helpful either, so instead, they chose to do such things together for the sake of their marriage.

Jana has always done this. She knows things about music and recording and Weezer and comic books that she probably wouldn't have except that she's married to a guy who knows a lot about those things (a great example would be the very nice guitar I mentioned in the last post... she had taken the time to learn that about me). And I know about soccer and Young Life and Wendell Berry books and David Wilcox records because those are things she is interested in. Jana taught me how to throw a frisbee and play Ultimate; I taught her about the X-Men. And our marriage is much stronger, deeper, and better for having done so. Like with anything, I find that if I can get inside of something new and engage it in my life, I will find a new appreciation for it. And with each passing day, month, and year, I continue to find newness and a new appreciation for her as we continue to, as best as we know how, to take those small steps towards each other.

I've certainly done some boneheaded things in the last eight years, some of which cost us a little money and time and some others that cost us a lot more money and time. But despite my crazy ideas that haven't worked as well as I thought, Jana has remained my biggest fan, encouragement, and example of God's feelings about me through her love with no strings attached, her patience, and at times, her compassionate forgiveness. I am not worthy of such a love, nor is it something I could have earned. It is a gift, and God forgive me for the times I have taken that for granted.

Almost eleven years ago, Jana and I fell in love working as summer camp counselors on St. Simons Island. It was the day before the end of the summer, and neither one of us really wanting it to be so, we ended up staying up all night, dipping our feet in the Epworth fountain, and fighting mosquitoes as big as your head under a full moon. Three years later we returned to that fountain, and I asked her if she might like to do such things with me for the rest of her life. That's where the song, A Lovely Shade of You, came from. I don't write too many traditional relationship love songs, but certain occasions call for such a thing.

Okay, enough sap for today. I've got things to do and kids to wrangle and clothes to wash. But I wanted to take a few moments to celebrate my wife; heck, maybe if we all did that a bit more our divorce rate wouldn't be so high.

 

Lovely Shade Of You by Jason Harwell  
Download now or listen on posterous

lovelyshade.mp3 (4673 KB)

Posted via email from JasonHarwell.com

Dad.

June holds for me two significant events - Father's Day and my wedding anniversary. This year, the two dates are only a couple of days apart.

Eight years ago, I married my lovely wife Jana. On the day before our wedding, she gave me a gift: a Gibson "Buddy Holly" reissue J-45 acoustic guitar, one of only 250 in existence. I gave her a Miles Davis album. That was kind of awkward.

Her gift to me is my single most prized possession (when it comes to "things" that I have), and having it has forever removed the desire in my being to have any other acoustic guitar. They say that things only satisfy you for so long before you want something new and shiny, and I would agree with that, except in the case of that guitar. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that it is a symbol of something bigger than wood and string or even music itself.

My father has the same guitar. An old one, from the sixties, that he got when he was a younger man. Growing up, some of my most important memories involve my father playing that guitar in our home. As I've gotten older myself, I don't really know if he played it all that much, but the times he did must have stuck to me like flypaper because in my memory, he played all the time. I always loved it when he would play; when he and my mother would practice some special song for a church service. I loved that my house had music in it [For a long time, I thought my dad wrote "Jack & Diane" and "Star of Bethlehem;" imagine my disappointment.]. And I always loved that old guitar. It was there for me as a teenager when I learned to play, and I built up a few callouses from the hours I spent banging out chords. And I do mean "banging."

I think of my father when I play my own guitar, something I do nearly every day. As the current of my life seems to take me further and further away from the performance stage, my own J-45 doesn't find many occasions to leave the house. Fortunately, my wife has given birth to a small audience of eager and enthusiastic music fans, one of whom is only big enough to enjoy banging on the side of it as I play for him in the floor. And I do mean "banging."

And so it goes that on a (mostly) daily basis, I hope to somehow be a bridge of what was in my own life to what is and will be in the lives of my own children. I hope to carry on the goodness I saw (and continue to see) in my father and to be a kind of father that imparts something lasting and good in my kids. I don't know if my father really knows the impact he has had on my life or if he imagines himself to be a "successful" man. I guess I feel the same way in my own life.

But when there's a tiny little girl singing silly songs and a small baby boy using my guitar as a percussion instrument, I begin to think less of my own life and more of the hope in theirs. 

My father taught me that.

Posted via email from JasonHarwell.com

Bring us some drudgery!

Two great posts on the goodness of doing the boring, repetitious, and tedious work we have before us:

Oswald Chambers' My Utmost For His Highest (June 15 entry):

In the matter of drudgery. Peter said in this passage that we have become “partakers of the divine nature” and that we should now be “giving all diligence,” concentrating on forming godly habits (2 Peter 1:4-5 ). We are to “add” to our lives all that character means. No one is born either naturally or supernaturally with character; it must be developed. Nor are we born with habits— we have to form godly habits on the basis of the new life God has placed within us. We are not meant to be seen as God’s perfect, bright-shining examples, but to be seen as the everyday essence of ordinary life exhibiting the miracle of His grace. Drudgery is the test of genuine character. The greatest hindrance in our spiritual life is that we will only look for big things to do. Yet, “Jesus . . . took a towel and . . . began to wash the disciples’ feet . . .” ( John 13:3-5  ).

We all have those times when there are no flashes of light and no apparent thrill to life, where we experience nothing but the daily routine with its common everyday tasks. The routine of life is actually God’s way of saving us between our times of great inspiration which come from Him. Don’t always expect God to give you His thrilling moments, but learn to live in those common times of the drudgery of life by the power of God.

It is difficult for us to do the “adding” that Peter mentioned here. We say we do not expect God to take us to heaven on flowery beds of ease, and yet we act as if we do! I must realize that my obedience even in the smallest detail of life has all of the omnipotent power of the grace of God behind it. If I will do my duty, not for duty’s sake but because I believe God is engineering my circumstances, then at the very point of my obedience all of the magnificent grace of God is mine through the glorious atonement by the Cross of Christ.

via utmost.org

From The Art of Manliness blog:

Editor’s note: In conjunction with the two-part series we’re doing on vocation and calling, we will be publishing excerpts from Self-Culture Through the Vocation by Edward Howard Griggs (1914).

Dead Work

There is no honest vocation that cannot be made to some extent a fine art. That is, in every honest vocation, each day, growth is possible, if the work is loyally done; and that, we have seen, is the meaning of art. Indeed, the one supreme fine art is the art of living, and the particular vocation gets its meaning as a phase of that highest art.

In most vocations, it is true, there is so much dull routine work that we can discover little growth in the action of the single day. To go to the shop and sell a spool of thread and a paper of pins, to make the physician’s daily round, prescribing for those who are ill and the larger number who think they are, to work over the lawyer’s brief for some petty quarrel, to write sermons for congregations that will not listen and that demand the sermon shorter every week—it all seems such a blind mill-wheel grind that one sees little progress in the day……

It is, nevertheless, just such work, done cheerfully and loyally, to a high purpose, through the succession of days, that builds into the human spirit the noblest elements of culture. What then do we mean by “culture”— some esoteric knowledge or remote adornment of life? Surely not. Its foundation elements are: loyalty to the task in hand, the trained will that does not yield to obstacles, cheerful courage in meeting the exigencies that come, serenity maintained amid the petty distractions of life, holding the vision of the ideal across the sand wastes and through the valley of the shadows: these are the basic elements of culture, and they are built into the spirit of a man or a woman by the loyal doing of dead work through the succession of days….

Then, too, there is an almost universal optical illusion with reference to work: each of us is fully conscious of the dead work in his own calling, because he must fulfill it; with the tasks of others, he sees only the finished product. Thus each is inclined to exaggerate the dead work in his own vocation and to envy the apparently easier and happier tasks of others. You sit down in an audience room, and some master at the piano sweeps you out on to the bosom of the sea of emotion, playing with you at his will. The evening of melody is over; there is the moment of awed silence and then the storm of applause; you go home exclaiming, “What genius!” O yes, it is genius: someone has defined genius as the capacity for hard work. Genius is more than that — much more; but no exaggerated talent would take a man far, without the capacity for hard work; and what you forget, as you listen to the finished art of the master genius, is the days and nights of consecrated toil, foregoing, not only dissipation, but even innocent pleasures others take as their natural right, that the artist might master and keep the mastery of the technique of his art.

The thing that seems to be done most easily, costs most in the doing and has been paid for, invariably, out of the life. It is when men work with most exhausting intensity, on the basis of a life-time of training, that they work with most apparent ease. This world is no lottery, where you take a chance ticket and run your risk of winning or losing a prize, but serious business, where nothing worthwhile comes any other way than through dead, hard work carried through the days and years. One never truly possesses anything one has not earned by hard effort. To possess money, you must have earned money, or you do not know its worth, nor how to spend it aright. To possess knowledge, you must have earned knowledge; and the brilliant student who slides through college on his wits, coaching up just before examination and winning fairly good grades, loses in the slower race of life beside even the ungifted plodder, who has taken faithfully every hard step of the road.

It is said of Euclid, formulator of the earliest of the sciences, geometry, that on one occasion he was called in to teach a certain king of Egypt his new science. He began as we begin, with definition, axiom and proposition — we have not improved appreciably upon his text-book; and the king grew restless and indignant: “Must a Pharaoh learn like a common slave?” Euclid, with that pride in knowing one thing well, that everyone ought to have who knows one science thoroughly to the end, responded: “There is no royal road to geometry!” We can universalize the statement: there is no royal road to anything on earth — perhaps in heaven either — worth having, except the one broad, open highway, with no toll-gates upon it, of dead, hard, consistent work through the days and years. Spinoza said — it is the last word in his Ethic: “All noble things are as difficult as they are rare; ” and we may add, they are rare because they are difficult.

Posted via web from JasonHarwell.com

Bring us some drudgery!

Two great posts on the goodness of doing the boring, repetitious, and tedious work we have before us:

Oswald Chambers' My Utmost For His Highest (June 15 entry):

In the matter of drudgery. Peter said in this passage that we have become “partakers of the divine nature” and that we should now be “giving all diligence,” concentrating on forming godly habits (2 Peter 1:4-5 ). We are to “add” to our lives all that character means. No one is born either naturally or supernaturally with character; it must be developed. Nor are we born with habits— we have to form godly habits on the basis of the new life God has placed within us. We are not meant to be seen as God’s perfect, bright-shining examples, but to be seen as the everyday essence of ordinary life exhibiting the miracle of His grace. Drudgery is the test of genuine character. The greatest hindrance in our spiritual life is that we will only look for big things to do. Yet, “Jesus . . . took a towel and . . . began to wash the disciples’ feet . . .” ( John 13:3-5  ).

We all have those times when there are no flashes of light and no apparent thrill to life, where we experience nothing but the daily routine with its common everyday tasks. The routine of life is actually God’s way of saving us between our times of great inspiration which come from Him. Don’t always expect God to give you His thrilling moments, but learn to live in those common times of the drudgery of life by the power of God.

It is difficult for us to do the “adding” that Peter mentioned here. We say we do not expect God to take us to heaven on flowery beds of ease, and yet we act as if we do! I must realize that my obedience even in the smallest detail of life has all of the omnipotent power of the grace of God behind it. If I will do my duty, not for duty’s sake but because I believe God is engineering my circumstances, then at the very point of my obedience all of the magnificent grace of God is mine through the glorious atonement by the Cross of Christ.

via utmost.org

From The Art of Manliness blog:

Editor’s note: In conjunction with the two-part series we’re doing on vocation and calling, we will be publishing excerpts from Self-Culture Through the Vocation by Edward Howard Griggs (1914).

Dead Work

There is no honest vocation that cannot be made to some extent a fine art. That is, in every honest vocation, each day, growth is possible, if the work is loyally done; and that, we have seen, is the meaning of art. Indeed, the one supreme fine art is the art of living, and the particular vocation gets its meaning as a phase of that highest art.

In most vocations, it is true, there is so much dull routine work that we can discover little growth in the action of the single day. To go to the shop and sell a spool of thread and a paper of pins, to make the physician’s daily round, prescribing for those who are ill and the larger number who think they are, to work over the lawyer’s brief for some petty quarrel, to write sermons for congregations that will not listen and that demand the sermon shorter every week—it all seems such a blind mill-wheel grind that one sees little progress in the day……

It is, nevertheless, just such work, done cheerfully and loyally, to a high purpose, through the succession of days, that builds into the human spirit the noblest elements of culture. What then do we mean by “culture”— some esoteric knowledge or remote adornment of life? Surely not. Its foundation elements are: loyalty to the task in hand, the trained will that does not yield to obstacles, cheerful courage in meeting the exigencies that come, serenity maintained amid the petty distractions of life, holding the vision of the ideal across the sand wastes and through the valley of the shadows: these are the basic elements of culture, and they are built into the spirit of a man or a woman by the loyal doing of dead work through the succession of days….

Then, too, there is an almost universal optical illusion with reference to work: each of us is fully conscious of the dead work in his own calling, because he must fulfill it; with the tasks of others, he sees only the finished product. Thus each is inclined to exaggerate the dead work in his own vocation and to envy the apparently easier and happier tasks of others. You sit down in an audience room, and some master at the piano sweeps you out on to the bosom of the sea of emotion, playing with you at his will. The evening of melody is over; there is the moment of awed silence and then the storm of applause; you go home exclaiming, “What genius!” O yes, it is genius: someone has defined genius as the capacity for hard work. Genius is more than that — much more; but no exaggerated talent would take a man far, without the capacity for hard work; and what you forget, as you listen to the finished art of the master genius, is the days and nights of consecrated toil, foregoing, not only dissipation, but even innocent pleasures others take as their natural right, that the artist might master and keep the mastery of the technique of his art.

The thing that seems to be done most easily, costs most in the doing and has been paid for, invariably, out of the life. It is when men work with most exhausting intensity, on the basis of a life-time of training, that they work with most apparent ease. This world is no lottery, where you take a chance ticket and run your risk of winning or losing a prize, but serious business, where nothing worthwhile comes any other way than through dead, hard work carried through the days and years. One never truly possesses anything one has not earned by hard effort. To possess money, you must have earned money, or you do not know its worth, nor how to spend it aright. To possess knowledge, you must have earned knowledge; and the brilliant student who slides through college on his wits, coaching up just before examination and winning fairly good grades, loses in the slower race of life beside even the ungifted plodder, who has taken faithfully every hard step of the road.

It is said of Euclid, formulator of the earliest of the sciences, geometry, that on one occasion he was called in to teach a certain king of Egypt his new science. He began as we begin, with definition, axiom and proposition — we have not improved appreciably upon his text-book; and the king grew restless and indignant: “Must a Pharaoh learn like a common slave?” Euclid, with that pride in knowing one thing well, that everyone ought to have who knows one science thoroughly to the end, responded: “There is no royal road to geometry!” We can universalize the statement: there is no royal road to anything on earth — perhaps in heaven either — worth having, except the one broad, open highway, with no toll-gates upon it, of dead, hard, consistent work through the days and years. Spinoza said — it is the last word in his Ethic: “All noble things are as difficult as they are rare; ” and we may add, they are rare because they are difficult.

Posted via web from JasonHarwell.com

Kid Ridiculous.

I laughed out loud when Jana showed me this picture of our daughter pretending to be one of her dolls.

Posted via email from JasonHarwell.com

Weakness!

It's been about a year since I went through counseling, which means it's been about a year since I realized just how weak I really am.

Beginning in my teenage years and continuing on through my twenties, I had become aware (and all too familiar) with some of my depressive tendencies. I couldn't really explain it; some days were just hard from the beginning, and little things (thoughts, experiences, conversations) could all be triggers that would send me off in a downward direction. Within moments, I could lose all hope as feelings of despair would just snowball out of control. I felt like I was drowning in my own skin, and I never saw it coming.

Like I said, I'd known this about myself for years. I tried to modify my behavior, tried to "buck up" and will myself out of the hole. I'd remind myself that all hope wasn't lost, that God cared about me, that I was fortunate. This only brought guilt and shame as I felt terrible for not seeing the goodness all around me. I was wasting my life. I was letting everyone down, including God; including myself. Try as I might, I couldn't figure out how to whip myself into shape, but I did learn to excel at whipping myself.

At some point last year, it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I'm 30 years old. If this hasn't gone away - or even gotten better - all by itself in 30 years, it's probably not going to. I need some help.

I've been happy to talk about this with folks face to face, but I haven't really mentioned it publicly. It's kind of hard to do that because I'm telling everyone (for eternity, in the case of the internet) of my weaknesses, of my inabilities to pull myself up by my own bootstraps. To have to come off my high horse and admit that I cannot do much on my own. To admit that I had been guilty of carrying some huge misconceptions about a God I claimed to know personally. To admit that in fact, I'd put myself on the kingly throne. That I needed others to tell me who I was, to validate my existence, and to give my life meaning. That I found my identity in how well I performed at the things I did. 

I could go on, but you get the point.

And so it was that, inwardly humiliated and ashamed, I contacted some friends for some recommendations for Christian counselors. A couple of weeks later I found myself sitting in "the chair" in a comfy office here in Athens, somewhat shocked in disbelief that I was, in fact, "in counseling." So much for my rugged individualism. All the "vision" I thought I'd possessed; all the great philosophical ideas; all the grand notions of "the world as it should be according to Jason," done. The end had come.

And then began anew as I dug more deeply into the scriptures than I ever had before. I was hungry for the word of God; I needed it. I read (for what felt like the first time) what God really thought of me. Not what I thought he thought of me, but what he actually said. I realized that my performance was not what he wanted. He's got infinite resources, so my work was no so important that he was depending on it. My heart... now that's what he wanted. And I wanted him to have that, to really have it. I began to reorganize my priorities, to try and find balance in my life. To learn to say "no" sometimes. To embrace the real freedom that Jesus died for instead of just suiting up in a different kind of chain.

I am still doing this a year later. At times it has been incredibly painful to "relearn" how to live my life, and it's something I'm still wrestling with. I'm still living with the consequences of the decisions I've made in the past (they don't go away, by the way). I'm still making mistakes with new consequences. There are no shortcuts; there is no easy. There is, however, forward.

On the day I finally accepted that I was not capable of saving myself, my whole life changed direction. I miss Rebuilt Records sometimes. I miss putting out records. It's hard to watch many of my friends doing greater and greater things with their art while I'm not. Now I have to fight feeling "washed up" and "useless" when I talk to other artists. What used to make me seem interesting to others ("Oh, you run a record label? Wow!" or "You hang out with all these cool artists? That's so awesome!") evaporated in a millisecond (and rightfully so). And while the human part of me still continues to wrestle with my need to receive someone's seal of approval, through it all, I'm more and more assured that the road ahead of me is a good one to walk. 

For many years I was angry at God for the way I was made. I'll never know why I am wired this way, and I also know there will never be a time in which I "conquer" the depression that seems to be always around the corner. I'll just have to stay alert, to continue to push forward towards God's truth in scripture, and to always be willing to admit (as I did a year ago) that I am not capable of saving myself. 

So now you know. And if you happen to look at my life and see goodness there, you'll know I had nothing to do with it. Thanks for reading this ridiculously long post.

^"8Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. ⁹But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. ¹⁰That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong."- 2 Corinthians 12:8-10

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Things You May Like If You Like The Kinds of Things I Like

If you're like me, you'll like these things: 

Singing With The Corner Flag (your in-depth World Cup soccer blog curated by none other than Erik C. Kriebel himself).

"Calling Vs. Vocation." The continuing series from The Art of Manliness. 

Vocation: Action Vs. Dreams

Vocation: The Necessity of Dead Work

Finding Your Calling, Part I: What Is A Vocation?

Finding Your Calling, Part II: The Myths and Realities of Vocation

(Note: I read this blog regularly, but I tend to subscribe to the "grain of salt" method. I don't always agree with everything on here, but I really like a lot of it. This series is good and challenging to think through.)

Good, personally challenging blogs about Jesus (and other things): 

Pages 

Lies I Overheard in Church

Music:

Micah's new EP, Gathered 'Round The Greasefire.

Jon's Up From The Ground project.

SmallHouse Creative

Posted via email from JasonHarwell.com