Music Was My Isaac
by Gregory Davis
Well, here goes. We’ve all heard about “the Isaac”. Something we love so much that it is like “killing a part of our soul” to “offer it up”.
For me, first it was my music. During college I had “discovered” the guitar and devoted countless hours to learn a few basic chords. I learned quickly and started performing at coffee houses and small school programs. I started writing songs about my “inner world”. Through music I had found my voice. I began to write and sing about spiritual things and this unlocked a world that I had no experience with. Profound images and expressions poured out without effort. I didn’t know where they came from.
My friends started saying really nice things about my expression and the melodies around them. Music and the spirituality within it became my center, and…my identity.
When I was “led” to the movement and started to study DP, so many many things “rang true”. I began to understand where my songs came from. They were messages from the spiritual world that had clearly brought me here.
In fact one of the last songs I wrote and performed was a song called “The Welder”. It was a prophetic song that foreshadowed me discovering the movement and the DP and the course that would follow.
Of course after I joined the IOWC in 1974 I quickly realized that now, was a “training time”. No more fun and games God was preparing me and thousands of others (like you Sam) to heed the call and “get ready” for the “train a comin”. Spiritual work to be done.
I knew, that I would have to willingly offer up “my Isaac”, for a time period. A wise elder sister told me once, “if you keep your music for public use only, you will never lose it”.
I believed her, I never played, other than occasional workshop and morning service singing for 12 years. I received a revelation that at some point God would “give it back” to me and I could be free to express my joy, spirituality and creativity again.
And he did, 12 years to the day.
Principal is not just “a book of nice ideas”. It is a living breathing thing that manifests in our lives. If we allow it to.