I have a confession to make, I'm addicted to Facebook. I do use it to actually accomplish things but I also just browse and read the randomness that populates it.
However I recently had to do a bit of a purge. People or pages that were consistently negative I unfriended or unliked. There are enough things in this world that bum me out I didn't need these harbingers of gloom adding to it.
I'm by nature a pretty positive person but if my days are filled ingesting negativity I'm bound to start oozing some out myself. I once heard a pastor say that if there is something you want out of your life the best thing you can do it fill your life up with good things. I'd assume the opposite must also be true. Fill your life up with enough negativity and it will squeeze out all the good.
We, as a church, tend to talk a lot about the gifts that God has giving us. We take tests to determine what our Spiritual Gifts are. It helps us know where to fit it, where to serve. I'm a teacher not an administrator, I'm a prophet not a greeter. And so we find our niche.
And God certainly did give us unique talents to serve Him in the best ways we can but we often use that as an excuse to stay inside our safe little comfort zone. When Jesus called his disciples He asked them to step out of their comfort zones and try something new. Sure there were skills and abilities that they already possessed but He challenged them to use those in new ways.
What new challenges are we shying away from because they make us uncomfortable and we excuse it by saying they are not a part of our Spiritual Gifts.
I am a creature of habit. I find something I like and I stick with it. At each fast food joint I order the same thing every time. My wardrobe has very little variations. And I have quite a rigid TV schedule. The smallest change in my life, even a positive one, can throw me completely out of whack.
But God is a God of changes. He stays the same but He wants to change us and those around us. Sometimes those changes are hard to accept. We may see the good in them but we're comfortable just where we are and wish it would all stay the same.
When I feel tempting to complain about changes God has for me I try to remind myself of this; no one has been asked to change more for God than Jesus. He had to leave is Father's side in Heaven, come to earth, and suffer and ultimately die a horrific death. When I think of that the changes He wants for me do seem rather small by comparison.
As most parents do, my wife and I often sing our son Alex to sleep at night. Of course there are plenty of renditions of the standards; “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, “Rock-a-bye Baby”, and so on. But in an effort to instill a sense of good musical taste we will often sing some non-traditional lullabies. Everything from “All I Want is You” to“Kingdom Come” soothed him to sleep. But it didn't take long until he had a favorite emerge, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, the Jeff Buckley version of course. I would sing this to him and try and explain why the Hallelujah was broken almost every night. But then I began working nights and the lullabying duties fell almost solely to my wife, Christy. Alex still requested “Hallelujah” of course, the only problem was that Christy didn't know the song well enough to sing it to him. So she came up with a fairly clever solution. She found the song on You Tube and would play it for him on her phone as they would sing along. Alex realized that there was something mommy was watching on her phone and he wanted to see it too. The only problem was this was the video my wife had been using to listen to the song.
The video features Jeff Buckley’s mournful rendition over video and pictures of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. This of course lead to some rather probing questions and deep conversation for a 2 year old. But essentially we boiled it down to some bad people broke those buildings and hurt a lot of people. This more or less satisfied his curiosity. But something strange emerged out of his watching the video. Not knowing the name of the World Trade Center, and probably struggling to pronounce it even if he did, he simply associated the song with the buildings so they became “The Hallelujah Buildings”
Such a cute and innocent name from a child. Obviously he has no idea what it means, one of the most tragic events my generation has ever witnessed. Hard to find much to “praise God” for on that day. But again do we need to be reminded of the faith of a child.
I've heard a thousand renditions of the song “Hallelujah”. Everyone form Leonard Cohen’s original to Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright to Damien Rice and many an awful version in-between. All of the versions worth listening to had one thing in common; mourning, heartbreak, you could feel the pain dripping all over the song. That was what this song was about, it was brokenness in C Major.
That was until one night Christy was making me the X Factor. And this happened.
When He started to sing my first thought was “oh no, another hackneyed job ruining a great song”. But then as it went on something different was happening. His “Hallelujah” was not mournful or broken. If was defiant. It was screaming “I may have been beaten, but I am not defeated.” This is far from the best version of the song but for the first time I saw the song in a new light and “The Hallelujah Buildings” seemed to make sense to me.
And this “New Hallelujah” seems to ring even truer in my own life. Praise God. Many times I have felt beaten, like my world has come crashing down around me and everything is lost. Praise God. But as beaten and lost as I may have felt I am never defeated. Praise God. He has already won the battle for me. Praise God. All I must do is claim the victory Jesus has won. Praise God.
My Hallelujah is not weeping. My Hallelujah is a battle cry.
Praise God.
This weekend I gathered with nearly 100 other Veterans at the site of the 9/11 memorial in New York. There we took an oath to continue our service to our communities as Fellows with The Mission Continues. That was our battle cry, that was our Hallelujah.
I'm heading out of town this weekend. I had everything except my toothbrush packed last night. That gave me a few more minutes to sleep in this morning before I have to head to the airport. I've gone over my packing list several times but still it feels like I'm forgetting something. It feels like there will be something that I'll realize I left behind as soon as I get to the hotel.
It is comforting to know that God never has that feeling. When we're not with Him, when we're "separated from the flock" God doesn't get that sneaking suspicion that something's missing. He knows. He knows who is missing, he knows just where they are, we are never forgotten. When all His people are called home to heaven He wont think to himself "seems like we're missing someone". He'll know the names of each and every person who is not there and He'll miss each and every one of them.
Throughout human history storytellers have invented boogeymen and big bad wolves to frighten their audiences.Sometimes these storytellers wanted to teach a lessen and sometimes they just wanted to entertain.
Today we invent our or villains for another reason. They distract us from the true evil. Make no mistake, there is evil in the world. But we make boogeymen out of whomever would disagree with us. So the true evil, the devil, is able to sneak about unnoticed while we're hunting the big bad wolf.
When I was in high school and beyond I played in a variety of bands. More often than not we never made it out of my parent's basement but one thing was always for certain; we would have a kickin name. Discussion of such usually occupied most of our first practice. Our band name would identify us, it let people get a glimpse of what we were all about before they ever heard our music so it was important we got it right.
Sometimes I wish our names were that way. We name our children before we know anything about them, is there really any chance of getting it right? When a new Pope is elected one of his first acts is to pick a new name, this name signifies what his papacy will stand for. God changed people's names all the time, what if we did the same? What if we changed our names when we accepted Jesus as our Lord? If you could pick a name to define what your new life would be like what name would you choose?
