Ghost Stories

I remember listening to the livestream launch party for Coldplay’s 2014 album, titled Ghost Stories while working in my home office many moons ago. The album resonated with me in a weird way because typically I love lyrics that speak to me and that I could sing and ‘own’. Other songs never quite sat as comfortably with me. Don’t get me started on tunes with other people’s names in them, or lyrics built around overly specific moments that didn’t feel remotely symbolic, they just didn’t cut it. Perhaps because I have never been much of a musician (short of a brief period of my life where I’d play the ‘spoons’ when I was younger), the melody and lyrics to songs have always held more weight to me than the musicianship. Which is why it was odd that Ghost Stories resonated with me so well. There’s so much symbolism to me here – but the one that stands out the most is the title. In fact, over time, that album became my own ghost story in some ways. To put that into context, Chris Martin said of the album’s theme – “how do you let the things that happen to you in the past – your ghosts – how do you let them affect your present and your future?”. And I never really saw the importance of that, even though it stuck with me in word form. Until recent years.

This post is not a review of the album or a celebration of my musical taste – but rather a marker of how things can come into our lives as seeds and never fully gain perspective until they’re needed. Exactly like some of the things attached to that album. I believe these things carry meaning and I also believe God has a hand in it. I believe that God speaks to us through the means closest to our hearts. The passions and joys in our lives can often hold truths that God puts a wider perspective on as life unfolds. I think sometimes he uses past markers to reveal deeper (and sometimes more painful) truths too. Like our “ghosts”.

To believe in ghosts is a fun debate and not one I intend to get into here, but I will say this much, I believe we all have our own ghosts. They aren’t always obvious at first. And we oftentimes get the choice to go full Scooby-Doo and run from them or, as Rafiki once said, we can learn from them. And if I know anything in my life I know that the Lion King is absolutely a sound source of logic and comfort.

For the longest time I believed everything happens for a reason. I don’t know if I believe that quite so simply anymore. Instead I think there is more to it than that. I think I’m learning that the God I know is unmistakably capable of taking things I would never have chosen and refusing to let them go to waste. Down to the tiniest detail of my life, I am starting to see shoots of life that come from ghosts planted a long time ago. Not all ghosts are inherently bad, and not all of them are helpful. But they all seem to have a season of resurfacing — and a capacity to be turned into something new. The challenge is allowing God to do something with those ghosts, and trusting Him enough to take the next step, then the next one after that.

You see, ghosts have the uncanny capacity for showing up at the most random moments. And when they walk into the room, it’s knowing where they belong that’s sometimes the hardest thing to compute. So much so that, for me at least, I would get so used to trying to find the rhyme and reason as quickly as possible. Bust the ghost as fast as possible, get over it, and move on to the next thing while humming Who you gonna call? But now I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think sometimes it takes patience. Sometimes it takes forgiveness. Sometimes it takes accepting that the answer isn’t just around the corner – and that actually there’s a bigger story at play. But always, without fail, it’s about trusting that no matter what ghost story I’m presented with – it’s a chance for something new and fresh to grow out of it. So maybe, just maybe, I’m starting to actually appreciate some of those ghosts. Probably not in the moment they show up, but in the fruit that follows. For me, my ghost stories were never meant to be the theme of my life, but they may still play a crucial role in the story God is telling through it.

[Started months ago, but finished in retrospect. Dated May 2026 because sometimes the meaning of a moment only becomes clear after you’ve moved beyond it.]