Why listening to Christian music makes me lazy

I listen to a good number of Christian contemporary music artists. Casting Crowns, Shawn McDonald, Hillsong, anyone? Their epic Jesus-y ballads score my workouts and car rides and grading sessions. And sometimes, I get a little lazy about it all.

It's not the musicians' or the music's fault. It's my own reliance on their worship as my own.

While romping through the woods solo yesterday, earphones scoring the hike per usual, I had to stop and question what I was doing. I was hiking uphill and working up a sweat and pumping endorphins and I was still being so lazy.

[tweet bird="yes"]I pulled the plug on the portrait of God that was being drawn by someone else.[/tweet]

I asked myself, is God really a Reckless Forgiver? A Lover of My Soul? Is He Not Dead but Surely Alive? These words were inspired by other believers whom I assume are in close relationship with Jesus. But am I trusting too much in the character that has been revealed to them and, basically, taking their word for it?

I began to think about the very specific ways God has revealed Himself to me recently: - God was with me when an elder handed me diet pills across the dining room table. He gave me the patience and the words to be loving, to show His character, even when I was insulted and in distress. (1 Cor 10:13) - He is so gentle in the faces and chubby hands of my kids who love me in spite of all of my intemperate streaks (Romans 2:4)

Those are just a couple of examples. I'm struck when I think how Solomon tells us that there is nothing new under the sun, and then we turn right around and read in Isaiah how God will do a new thing.

I just don't want to underestimate, underexpect, undervalue the newness and the freshness and the total specificity of God. In all His glory, He reaches down to earth and shows His care in such awesome and totally relevant ways, to our own unique and often crappy situations, crappy situations of our own making.

Friends, I just want to have eyes that will see and ears that will hear everything He is doing, not relying on someone else to tell me, or sing an epic ballad about it. I realize more and more this requires being present and showing up even when I want to be a lazeabout.

None of this is new under the sun, but His blessings are new every morning.

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My intention for this spring semester is to show up to my devotion time even when I don't feel like it, even when I have every excuse not to show up. Have you set an intention for the new year or new semester or new season of life? Feel free to link up a post or share below!

Why Christmas is, inherently, nostalgic

The kids and I weren't aware we started a ritual last week, but it was the beginnings of something worthwhile. Basically all you do is come home from school and work and go to the freezer and take out the Slow-Churned Edy's Chocolate ice cream and eat as much as you can stand while talking about your day at the kitchen table. You do this every day, at first because it's cold outside and oddly the most comforting thing is a bowl full of chocolate ice cream, with requisite chocolatey mustaches to boot.

In order to continue the ritual, you have to buy more of the freezer food of the gods. No other flavor or variety will do. You can still sit and talk about big ideas and bellyache about petty people, but something will be missing. Graham crackers and milk do not cut it.

***

My friend Lisa picked me up from the airport today. I knew we didn't have any ice cream at home so I made asked her to take me to Frogurtland so we could dish, literally and figuratively. It was like I was homesick for chocolate ice cream.

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My uncle Bob died last week and it was the kind of awful terrible unfathomably unfair thing, in spite of having lived a very full and happy life. Just the way he went. Parkinson's Disease is a total crap way to go, the slow lumbering suffering and total awareness of the dismantling of everything over which you once had control.

I'm not into the theology of our loved ones smiling down on us. Not yet. I'm into the theology that we weren't made for any of this. We were made for a better world. Every ache and acute feeling of separation in this world is a reminder that we were made for wholeness and unity.

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The best scene in all of Mad Men is the last episode of Season I ("The Wheel") when Don Draper is selling the "carousel" marketing pitch to Kodak. He defines nostalgia in such a perfect way that it reaches across every culture, generation, sex, race, state. Nostalgia, "delicate but potent," that which causes us to ache in our hearts to return to a place we have once been, to have what we once had.

***

The irony of the song "Silent Night" is that the entire point of Christ's entrance into this world was to expose the violence, the jealousy, the greed--the total lack of heavenly peace on earth. There could have been little solace there in the manger or beyond, given Herod's orders. According to Ortberg's "Who is this Man?," Herod, upon hearing the news of the birth a King of the Jews, ordered soldiers to plunge their swords into every baby boy in Bethlehem. How still we see thee lie.

***

Christmas is nostalgic. Christmas is the reminder of three-speed bikes once-longed-for. Christmas is finally getting to go to midnight mass. Christmas is observing new chocolate ice cream traditions at 3 o'clock in the cold winter afternoon.

But Christmas is also inherently nostalgic. Christ's birth is nostalgic, pointing us to a condition we once had and can once again attain, but only through Him. He was born, vulnerable to a broken world. The earth ached to return to what it once was. Christ, the one who would redeem us all, longs to restore our factory settings so that our hearts may no longer know the pain of separation.

29 Days

"I think our music exists in the 29 days," said Jars of Clay frontman Dan Haseltine on a recent Relevant podcast.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

The foundational voice of one of the preeminent Christian music forces in the last century thinks his music really comes out of and speaks into the 29 days. That is, the majority of days in the month that are just not really all that dreamy. Jars of Clay says that because Jars of Clay must know about that: The good days, the golden days are the exception. The rare block on that calendar with forecast sunny, all day long. Most days are full of anxiety that grips us at a stoplight for no reason, heaviness because we misinterpreted a text message, avocados that are already rotting, and unanticipated bills.

There are blessings but the 29 days remind us that we are not home yet.

I love Jars of Clay. Each album has its own tone, its own mature sound. I especially like songs like "Safe to Land" and "Reckless Forgiver" and "Boy on a String" because they talk about what I now know are the 29 days. Dealing with our own concept of God in the midst of our mess. Seeing him show up to our landfills and begin plowing and packing through the garbage piled high.

Haseltine has contended with some well-earned controversy for his ponderings on Twitter recently, which he addresses in the podcast. Less interesting to me was his confirmation that he had thought about these things for a long while. More interesting to me was that he believed that church was a place to wrestle with doubt, to question and reason and help one another--because why else are we here? To be nothing but upstanding, confident in our every position? To pretend as though we are having 30 full days of bliss?

There are reasons why a band like Jars of Clay has survived and evolved through the last 20 years and we who are not on the inside nor omniscient will never fully understand. I have to believe, though, that there's a key to survival that is offered in the 29 days, in the doubt, in the embrace of all that is not sunny and certain so that it may be examined and held to the light, for many months, for 20 years, and perhaps for as long as our little clay jars endure.