Nov 22, 2010

"and heaven meets earth like a (CENSORED!!!!!)"

a lot has happened since my last blog. this first segment will be for those who are not involved in my immediate world:

1) I am (finally) Employed. I work for Booster Enterprises, a company that does elementary school fundraising. I get to speak life into kids daily. hand sanitizer is required

2) 4, count them, 4 of my good friends have gotten engaged: Bret Waldrep to Jennifer Waites, Malcolm Reddoch to Sydney Flowers, Eric Parker to Katie Shaddix, and Ashley Breitenstein to Corey Wilkes.

What. the. Heck.

3) CGI Harry Potter and Hermione made out naked?!?!?!?! Poor Innocent Ron

that should get everyone about caught up. 

recently I have had the privilege of leading worship again at my home church in alabaster. Leading worship for middle schoolers and highschoolers is a whole different ball game, especially given the circumstances I came into.  after my first week my drummer informed me that he wouldn't be playing because he was, get this, grounded. these are the kinds of life or death issues I'm dealing with. 
during the first week i played mostly new songs, including How he loves by John Mark McMillan. I've referenced this song in an earlier post (see Post Here) and how much it means to me. now before i even got up there i realized that the infamous Sloppy Wet Kiss line was going to be an issue, but luckily my favorite chipmunk, who sometimes leads worship under the name David Crowder, had covered this song with the line "unforeseen kiss". now why the image of some creeper sneaking a kiss from a girl is better than a sloppy one beats me, but I had determined that this version would be more appropriate. 
Unfortunately, my subconscious had different plans, and when it came time to sing the lyrics in my less abrasive way, something took over and I said that which will forever haunt me in middle school land. 

now i tell this story to illustrate a point, I think. I, personally, resent the idea that we are going to sing different words because the original ones make us uncomfortable. the idea of Gods' love being messy is something that doesn't fit in our neat and pretty view of how we want God to look. but the reason the Gods love is NECESSARILY messy, in my humble opinion, is not because of the bride groom but the bride. 

Listen to the Song. the whole thing is about being emotionally swept away by the fact that even though we are broken, afflicted and continuously unfaithful, God is Jealous for us. for God in all of his Glory to interact with Us in all of our sinfulness, things tend to be sloppy, because he is not surgically precise when he displays his love to us, he LAVISHES US with it! we do not have a portion of his love, we have the fullness of his affection.

I think this scares us, to be honest with you. we are so scared of kids making out with their girlfriends that we try to sterilize our worship, to the point that what happens is we sing a lot of right things, but we aren't moved by them. 

here is why I lead worship: to lead people to the feet of Jesus. the only things that can happen there are Humiliation, Exaltation, or Rejection.

  The Cross will humiliate you if you'll stop trying to clean the blood off of it. it is where the Love and Mercy of God are set on display BY HIS WRATH BEING DISPLACED FROM ME TO JESUS.  the picture of Gods Love is incomplete without an understanding of the weight of what Christ endured. 

Once brought low, you see the magnitude of What Christ has done, and you cannot help but to worship him. He is great, and his greatness is most uniquely and gloriously shown in his love and sacrifice for sinners. 

the last reaction is quite honestly the one that we are most prone towards. its not a rejection of the cross as an idea, because we LOVE the cross as an idea. But if we begin to see it for what it really is we might do something crazy, like give our lives up. and so we insulate ourselves, sing under our breath so no one thinks we're getting "lost in the moment", we may clap to the beat a little bit, but we will NOT make a spectacle of ourselves. "those people" are just trying to get attention. 

I know, there are practical reasons we should sing the verse about sloppy wet kisses to middle schoolers, they're immature and will probably laugh. but if we continue to insulate them, can we really blame them for their immaturity?  


thats whats rolling through my dome right now. i should have more time to blog in the coming weeks. i'll try not to take to long of a hiatus. until next time, stay classy interwebs