My brother Ben is, without argument, the most sophisticated connoisseur of popular culture in the Isaacs clan. Ten years ago, while I was still holding onto my Elton John and Yanni tapes (thinking that compact discs—but never Yanni—would go out of style) he had already entered the new world of technology, collecting dozens of CDs from a wide range of musical genres. Before I had even heard of a musical group, he had already grown tired of them.

While I was getting ready to go away to college, he helped me start my own CD collection me with a few of the "outdated" CDs he was no longer listening to. One of the albums, U2’s Achtung Baby, had already been out for several years. But for me, it would be the musical discovery of the decade and an unexpected gift from God a la Bono.

Going away to an Adventist college was shockingly difficult for me. I was homesick and lonesome. I missed my parents and the culture of open questioning that they encouraged. God seemed terribly far away and lost in Adventist orthodoxy and church performance. I remember coming back to my room after classes or chapel and lying on my bed for hours at a time. One night, I spent an hour (that’s all?) on my knees demanding that God speak to me. Nothing happened and I gave God up. The isolation I encountered then pinned me down—like my very own sitting demon.

The first time I played U2’s Achtung Baby that isolation was broken. I would listen to the album over and over again, feeling comforted and understood. When I found out that three of the band’s four members were self-professed Christians, it was like I had been given permission to feel angry and sad—a permission that stood in stark contrast to the glib advice a number of my Adventist peers had given me to "just read my Bible more and pray a little harder." In time, I regained my balance in the world and emerged from my first real bout with depression.

I don’t touch the album so much anymore because as soon as the first beats of the song "Zoo Station" begin, I have a kinesthetic memory of this music that physically takes me to a different place and time in my life. When I listen to this album, my body feels both the sadness of that time and the accompanying hope that it would not always be that way. This music was the soundtrack to my first Dark Night of the Soul. It is a reminder to me that we all have our sadnesses and sitting demons but that God doesn’t hold those against us or leave us alone because of them.

Though what I felt at eighteen years of age was little more than good old-fashioned adolescent angst, learning from Bono and the boys that "this too shall pass" was a vital resource in facing more adult struggles later on. I am acutely aware, however, that the crises I have faced so far in my adult life have been relatively free of the struggles and pains that daily threaten the physical and spiritual well-being of so many of God’s children.

I have learned then that God does not require us to keep a running tab on our suffering or to outdo one another with sad stories in order to minister to others who are in pain. But we do have to open ourselves to the reality in which they are in—even if it disturbs ours. Working with and for prisoners, for example, I have heard and seen things that I wish were not true. Occasionally, when my mind drifts or I’m sleeping, my brain automatically processes the images and stories I have seen and heard in ways that sometimes confuse and scare me.

At the same time, I wouldn’t trade what I have gained spiritually in my work for the peace of mind that comes from living in a G-rated world. (Where is that world by the way? And why do people pretend to live there?) For every ugly truth I have learned about the capacity of humans to do harm, I have been witness to an even greater truth: where people are, there is God, loving them and calling them back to wholeness. No matter the ugly truths we hold about ourselves and others, there is God—not afraid of the ugly or the unclean.

Many Christians see the path to righteousness as a path to be cleaned, trimmed, fenced off, and located in pretty country settings. They often say this path is walked by "setting our minds on things above, not on things on the earth" or "bringing every thought into captivity" (those poor, captive thoughts). Like these Christians, I see the wisdom in being discerning and careful about the workings of our mind, the flow of our thoughts.

But unlike them, I do not see the same dangers they do in using our imagination to make sense out of the beautiful, the terrible, and the ugly in this world. Through the writings of prophets like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Habakkuk, the poetry of Job and Ecclesiastes, the stories about Jesus’ own life, and the music of U2, I have learned that even though I must push off my own sitting demons from time to time, I am not failing in my Christian life simply because of those struggles.

The Jesus I love, then, is the Jesus who accepts the fact that I struggle and freak out and scare myself from time to time. For this reason, if Jesus comes to me as the lord of my thoughts, let it not be as the editor and censor of my life, the Big Brother who sets up a surveillance camera in my head, the jailer of conscience that flogs me when I step out of line, the Freudian psychoanalyst who strategically maps my psyche then says—"Hmm, very interesting."

If Jesus does come to me as the lord of my thoughts, let it be as the sometimes solitary human who stood face-to-face with his and others’ demons, who questioned God’s presence in his own life, who counted among his friends those the dominant culture labeled as polluting influences. Let this Jesus come into my thoughts and my dreams. Let this Jesus renew my mind.

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