Great wide open

Into the Great Wide Open was the eighth studio album by American rock band Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, first released in 1991. The album was the band’s last with MCA Records. The album was the second Petty produced with Jeff Lynne after the success of Full Moon Fever.

Interestingly the music video for the song starred Johnny Depp, who had moved to Los Angeles as a teenager to seek rock stardom, along with Gabrielle Anwar, Faye Dunaway, Matt LeBlanc, Terence Trent D’Arby and Chynna Phillips.  I wonder how this opportunity shaped the careers of these actors and where there desire took them?

God knows the danger of ignoring our hearts, and so he reawakens desire. You see a photo in a magazine, and pause, and sigh. You see someone with a life that reminds you of the life you once thought you would live. You’re channel surfing one night and see someone doing the very thing you always dreamed you would do—the runner breaking the tape, the woman enjoying herself immensely as she teaches her cooking class. Sometimes all it takes is seeing someone enjoying themselves doing anything, and your heart says, I want that too.

 

God does this for our own good. He does it to reawaken desire, to stir our hearts up from the depths we sent them to. He does it so that we don’t continue to kill our hearts and so that we don’t fall prey to some substitute that looks like life but will become an addiction in short order.

He sometimes does it so that we will seek the life we were meant to seek. Isn’t this just what happens to the prodigal? He wakes one day to say, “How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!” (Luke 15:17). “Look at their lives,” he says. And he is stirred to head for home.

May you this week notice what awakens your desire that God has placed in your heart and follow its lead.  In the process may you be restored, renewed, revived, and redeemed.  Grace and peace.

Great wide open

Restore to me
All that was lost
In between our last conversation
And our encounter this morning

Renew my mind
With those thoughts
That left me after we last talked
And our chance meeting today

Revive my soul
With your Spirit
Like how it used to be
When we talked every day

Redeem my life
As I set my eyes on you
From this day and always
Into the great wide open