or hold significant meaning for you.
In the late 70s and early 80s, I spent a lot of my time playing in a rock band. Much of this time I was also attending worship at the FSU campus ministry, Campus House. A the time there wasn’t any commercial contemporary Christian music that interested me. All I heard was the super-sweet pop style or the real heavy rock style. I never heard anything in the middle and these didn’t interest me. The conflict of playing secular rock and being a Christian was always in my mind. One day I visited my friends, Tripp and Joann Andersen. Tripp was really into hard punk music. It was not a genre that I liked but our friendship transcended that difference. Tripps was one of the most beautiful souls I have ever met. Anyway, while there he put on a new album he just got. U2’s “War”. I was not familiar with it but he just let it play. As it played I started getting into the sound. After it finished, he played it from the beginning a second time with the sounds turned up a little more. The opening track is “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and I listened to the lyrics that described the horror felt by Bono if the troubles in their home in Northern Ireland. It was very powerful. But that’s not what caught my attention. At the end of the song, just before it faded out, Bono sings, “And the battle’s just begun to claim the victory Jesus won on [Sunday Bloody Sunday]. This was the first time I’d heard rock music with a Christian message without the band being a “Christian Band”. They were rock musicians that were Christian. Since then U2 has mostly drifted into a more “humanist” approach to Christianity. But at this time, they were more direct in their faith. I loved their music, but they helped me to believe that whatever I do as a career, even music, I can be an outspoken Christian too. I loved their first five albums before their style wandered into another direction.
Favorite tracks: "Sunday Bloody Sunday", "New Year's Day", "Two Hearts Beat as One", and "40".
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