Bought a ticket

"It's all a matter of how bad you want it," my dad always said. I can name every place I was when he told me this: Standing under the basketball hoop on an August afternoon; riding home in the truck after a game; learning how to prune cherry trees in the orchard; sitting on my bed with my guitar across my lap.

When I was seven we were driving North on Highway 221 heading toward our house near Dayton, Oregon, when my dad said he would buy me any guitar in the world if I could learn to play the solo on "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits. He had already bought me my first guitar two years earlier at a garage sale when I was 5, but I wouldn't know it until I found the old Yamaha acoustic a coat closet when I was thirteen. Who knows if I would've bothered to pick it up if it had been given directly to me as a gift.

In May of 1999, at the end of my freshman year at Dayton, my guidance counselor asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and when I told her, she replied, "...Is there, um, anything more practical that you want to do?" "No," I answered.

Today I bought a plane ticket to Hollywood on the 10-year anniversary of my conversation with the guidance counselor. Immediately doubt and fear began to set in. Were I standing alone, the pressure might be enough for me to collapse.

Sometimes I feel that doing it for me is not a good enough reason, no matter how bad I want it. But if "myself" isn't enough of a reason to go, I can do it for my mom, dad, and sister who never told me to turn it down. These are the people who pulled me out of the pit two months ago when everything came undone.

"And they worked to give faith hands and feet
And somehow gave it wings"

-Rich Mullins