Daily Blogging?

You might wonder what happened to the daily blogging thing that I committed to do.  Well, if you read back a bit, you'll see a post on daily walking.  It came down to spending an hour every day walking or an hour every day blogging, and frankly, I need to walk a whole lot more.  So, I will continue to blog as much as possible, but it will be spotty once again until I find the time to carve out for thoughtful consideration of blog posts!

The Toolbox

Either last week or the week before, I watched a series of videos by Nathan Nockels talking about the click track that they use for A Mighty Fortress.  You can find the first of the series here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XKC1gtXXYk.  As adamant as I have been in the past about using click tracks, these videos softened me to the concept.  I still stick by my question that musicians have been keeping time for centuries without a metronome piped into their ears, why can't we?  That being said, a click track allows the team to expand their sound and do things they couldn't do otherwise.

I don't know if you all know this, but I spent a summer once working in an 1875 cabinetmaker's shop making furniture with period tools.  Woodworking takes on a different light when you are using dovetail saws, and handsaws and foot powered lathes.  However, there were many occasions that we wished we could do something with the wood that it was either extremely time intensive or simply impossible to do with hand tools.

In the same manner, there are things that we could do to fill out our sound if we used the tools available to us.  So, this week, since Ryan (my intern) is leading worship Sunday, I've been learning the ins and outs of tools like Ableton Live and Reason so that we can try some click track things coming up on March 7th (the team that Sunday is right for throwing something completely new at them).  Of course, I am still of the conviction that there are teams out there that use click track far too often.  To use the woodworking analogy, they use a buzz-saw for everything.  I would hope a balance could be found so that we can use all the tools at our disposal.

What are your thoughts on click tracks?  Do you think they take away or add to the music?

God of Justice

I just posted the devotional for God of Justice.  Head over to the devotional page to check it out.  It's on God of Justice by Tim Hughes.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2332591&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1

God of Justice

I ran across this song a couple of months ago, and thought that it would be a perfect missions month song, but more than that it hits the themes that I think we need to be reminded of over and over again.  Justice.  Mercy.  Loving the unloved.  These themes go hand in hand with worship.

We’ve talked before about Amos 5:21-24.  God hates and despises our worship when it is not accompanied by justice and mercy.  Micah 6:8 follows along the same lines where it says, “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly before the Lord.”  Yet again we see that theme of the Lord requiring of us justice and mercy and kindness.

How does this happen?  I think Tim Hughes does a great job of reminding us of both the purpose and the method that we might show the world around us love.  That God of justice was a savior to us all.  He came to rescue the weak and the poor.  Most importantly, He came to serve and not to be served.  That is our example, to serve and not to be served!  This was just as countercultural then as it is now.  The disciples were shocked when Jesus washed their feet.  This was the same Jesus who John the Baptist was unfit to tie His sandals, yet He was serving the disciples at a base level.  This of course was a picture for how He came to serve all on the cross of Calvary.

I don’t know about you, but I have trouble with knowing how to answer this call.  This call to go live to feed the hungry and stand beside the broken.  I have been contemplating justice for months now since David Nasser’s talk about being the Bride of Christ in the world.  In a completely unrelated time, I was watching today a message John Piper gave this week about C.S. Lewis and how he is the second most important dead person in his life.  About 50 minutes into his message, he starts talking about what Lewis taught him about the perils of introspection.  He quotes C.S. Lewis, and I’ll repeat the quote here.

This is our dilemma . . . as thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humor while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things?

You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning around to look at the hope itself. . . . Introspection is in one respect misleading. In introspection we try to look inside ourselves and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of our turning to look at it. Unfortunately this does not mean that introspection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of all our normal activities; and what is left behind is mainly mental images and physical sensations. The great error is to mistake this mere sediment or track or by product for the activities themselves.

Then Piper ties it all together by saying this, “What this has meant for me is, first, that I see now that the pursuit of Joy must always be indirect—focusing not on the experience but the object to be enjoyed. And, second, I see that faith in Jesus, in its most authentic experience is suspended when it is being analyzed to see if its real. Which means this analysis always ends in discouragement. When we are trusting Christ most authentically, we are not thinking about trusting, but about Christ. When we step out of the moment to examine it, we cease what we were doing, and therefore cannot see it. My counsel for strugglers therefore is relentlessly: Look to Jesus. Look to Jesus in his word. And pray for eyes to see.”

How do we love justice and mercy?  How do we keep from just singing?  We focus on Christ, always on Christ.  How else will we know justice than to look to the perfect Judge Himself?  How else will we see mercy unless we see Him who showed such mercy and grace at the cross that we must be made speechless?  Our prayer should be, “fill us up and send us out.”  Just as Piper prayed for “eyes to see,” let us be praying for hands to love and eyes to see and feet to go.  I know that if that is truly the desire of our heart, He will open up opportunities, and before we know it, we will look back and say, “wow, look how God was glorified by serving those people!”

So, as we worship, let us remember that our worship is not just songs on Sunday, but rather our songs on Sunday are about our worship throughout our lives!