Captain of my Soul by Afterglow

Captain of my Soul

We are here on Earth to work out our own salvation and we can receive great joy as we work and struggle, pursue and achieve righteous goals. We truly are the masters of our own destiny. But when the way is rough and rocky, it is comforting to know that we have a perfect Eternal friend who will support us and help us set a steady course through life.

At times my life is dark and so confusing.
At times my heart is weighted with despair.
Cause though I try to win seems I'm still losing,
As all my efforts vanish in the air.

They say you gotta fight to gain the glory.
They say you gotta strive to win the prize.
It's gotta be like in those old time stories
Where heroes walked with vict'ry in their eyes.

I am the captain, captain of my soul,
Master of my destiny.
With the truths that I've been given
I can choose the path for me.
I'm the master of my destiny.

Life with all its sorrow and confusion--
Sometimes it seems we're walking all alone.
There's gotta be someone we can rely on.
I know we'll never make it on our own.

They say you gotta fight to gain the glory.
They say you gotta strive to win the prize.
But one whose name I've heard in Bible stories
Stands waiting there with vict'ry in his eyes.

He'll be the captain, captain of my soul,
Master of my destiny.
Knowing ending from beginning
He can plan my course for me.
He's the master of my destiny.
--Afterglow

Here, at long last, is the follow-up I wanted to do for the Invictus post. When I wrote that post, I remembered a song by Afterglow which also talked about the "Captain of my Soul." I was curious about which of the two poems in the Invictus post the song would be closer to -- the one that says I have control over my own destiny, or the one that says we ought to let Christ pilot us through the rough waters. Well, as you can see from the lyrics posted above, it's both. Fascinating eh?

I got the lyrics by continually asking mom to look for the tape that had the song on it. She finally went looking for it, and ended up just sending a pile of tapes with LDS pop music out to me. I listened to a lot of junk before I came to the song I was looking for, but it was worth it in the end. Interestingly, the stuff by Afterglow has stood the test of time much better than most of the other artists. If you want to revisit the old days yourself, you can download all sorts of old LDS pop music at LDS Tunes Now.

The best part of the whole process though, was that when Mom really started looking through her old tapes, she found the one that I REALLY wanted a copy of -- the Articles of Faith songs by Shelton and Ostler. Last April, when Mom looked for the tape, she couldn't find it, and thought it must have gotten lost somewhere, which was odd because of all the tapes we had, this is the one I'd think she'd be LEAST likely to lose or get rid of. I would guess that we got the tape and book of sheet music around the time I was 8 -- it was definitely before we moved when I was 10. These songs not only set the Articles of faith to music, like the ones in the Children's Songbook, they set them to fun, memorable tunes that actually helped with memorization. They also had an interesting format: the first verse was the AOF, then came an interlude that explained the key points for kids who might not understand the big words, then they sang the AOF again. We listened to that tape a LOT, and I, of course, memorized all the lyrics. I ended up knowing all the articles of faith long before it was required in Merry Miss. When that time did come, our teacher, Sister Cindy Gaspar, gave us ice cream sundaes with an extra topping for every AOF we could recite. I had an extremely gooey, sweet sundae -- and actually stopped putting toppings on before I ran out of Articles of Faith because it was just too much :)