Alanna Dailey - Lost

Lost: Choice
In class we listened to a series of songs with the theme of being lost. “Through Smoke” by Needtobreathe, one of my favorite bands, also has a lost theme. The song is about struggling to find your way through the smoke that blinds you. The lost in this song is mental state of lost. The singer is lost and confused about his own belief systems due to opposing messages from others:
“Who do you believe when you can't get through (through smoke)
When everything you know seems so untrue (through smoke)
When I'm lost in a place that I thought I knew (through smoke)
Give me some way that I might find you (through smoke)”
When we talked about lost in class, we were related it to the home place. “Through Smoke” is not about a physical place/location. It is about finding one’s self pertaining to beliefs and values. Often when a oral culture was driven from their home land, they not only lost their home place, but also their religious home place. Oral cultures were forced to convert to Christianity and forsake their native religion. I imagine that the oral peoples felt similar to the theme in “Through Smoke:”
“I was raised to believe in the power of the unknown
'Cause when the answers and the truth take different sides….
When their whispers have painted pictures that,
Make you doubt what you once believed in,
Paper stories that hide the glory
To keep us searching
Through smoke
They are forced to doubt their own beliefs and accept and foreign religion and make it their own