…and asked you how your church is doing what would you say?

go check out the big discussssssion over at ragamuffin soul.

happy wednesday, everybody. (it seems that there are only five of you, and four out of five of you stay updated through a feed reader…see here if you wonder what in the world i’m talking about…) a new feature of wednesday worship posts will be the previous sunday’s set list. on sunday, may 18 we sang the following songs:

everyday – as recorded by lincoln brewster
holy is the lord – as recorded by chris tomlin
i surrender all – as recorded by brian littrell (yeah he’s the ex-backstreet boy)

(**side note, every one of these songs was guitar-driven. that’s how i roll.)

please enjoy this week’s musical worship offering: let me sing, by todd fields of north point community church. this song wasn’t really my fav when i first heard it at catalyst convention last year, but it has grown on me. we’re gonna teach it to the church this sunday. if you’re a blog reader AND you go to my church, then you have the distinct privilege of being ahead of the pack and in the know… here you go.

i’ll work a few quick hits on the last several days into this wednesday worship post. it has been a crazy week.

1. gretchen and i drove to atl, packed, cleaned, connected with friends, signed over power of attorney to sell our townhome, drove back to marion, rented a storage facility, and returned to work/life in a matter of 54 hours. w00t. i’m totally beat. i may not fully recover for a few days.

2. everyone in my band will get to meet “tired adam” at practice tonight. “tired adam” is generally less friendly, less tolerant of dumb jokes, less willing to be flexible…just an all-around stand-up guy. anybody would be both honored and lucky to get to meet him…hopefully he doesn’t scare off any of the talent 2-nite.

3. a guy i know wrote a post on his blog that not only strongly contradicts many things i have learned about ministering to un-churched, post-modern, de-churched, normal people…but does so in a very pointed and critical way. also, it’s worth noting that he disabled comments on just that post. i haven’t really figured out whether it makes me mad or just sad…more mad i think. i’m still considering whether or not to post a response. i probably won’t, mostly because he seems to have drawn the “battle lines” in a very aggressive place, and i don’t think it will edify anybody to get in a spitting match. if you’re a person who prays, you could pray for me on this one. preciate cha.

4. my tired body didn’t handle a lunch of hunan beef very well this afternoon. i’ve had an upset stomach pretty much the rest of the day.

5. on the other hand, i really enjoyed the company i shared [staff] lunch with. probably a fair enough trade-off. they’re not the slickest-suavest staff around, but they’re fun to work with.

6. don’t know if i mentioned how tired i am. so, yeah, i’m pretty tired.

7. last friday evening we finally got over to mount vernon to see some of my college friends. i love those dudes, and it was good to reconnect finally. (we’ve been in ohio for over a month, and it was the first chance i’d had to see them.)

8. the sale and closing of our house seems to be moving along and approaching rapidly. …but it still can’t come soon enough. we love that house and the neighborhood and the city and all that, but that mortgage has been such an albatross around our necks… when i hear for sure that the sale has closed and we no longer own it, i might plant a big, wet kiss on the first person i see…hopefully gretchen will be close by, because i don’t want a lawsuit on my hands for frenching a complete stranger…

9. stopped by the fusion church office yesterday on the way out of town. those guys (and gals) are rock stars. i loved my time working there, and i remember it fondly. i don’t claim to know or understand god’s plan, but i do feel like i have some insight into the past few months’ events. i feel very strongly that we are where we’re supposed to be here in marion. and if tony hadn’t had to lay me off, then i probably would never have left, even though i was working outside outside of my gift set and passion. so there you go. as gretchen said yesterday, “god is not an idiot.” wise words from the woman god gave me.

10. i miss my daughter. she’s staying with her grandparents until friday, and that might just be a couple days too long for my taste. i’ll admit, though, that the past three days would’ve been a hundred times harder with her. but i still miss her.

have a great day.

this is a special gift to my peeps. they played this song at buckhead church on easter, and it was an unbelievable experience. the guy who wrote it is called john mark mcmillan. he’s got a raw beauty in his music that is really warm, and he’s a rockstar of a lyricist. i seriously get this song stuck in my head for weeks on end. so, you’re welcome.

love it or not?

what do you think?

i’ve had other friends experience similar situations with loved ones, and it doesn’t get any easier each time. i’m always left wondering the same questions like “why in the world would this happen to them of all people?” and “how can they live through this kind of pain and still have faith in god?” and i don’t know the answer. it’s not an easy, 3-step process. it’s not something that can be explained with an exegetical formula. it’s just something that sucks and is confusing and that we might never understand.

philosophically speaking, maybe the presence of darkness helps accentuate and compliment the light, and vice versa. that statement doesn’t deal with why bad things happen to good people, but at least it gives some sort of purpose to the darkness or bad that occurs around us. i tend to think that bad things just happen sometimes, whether in the midst of good or bad. but the presence of light makes the bad that happens seem that much worse, because the contrast is greater. the shadow exists in and of itself, but the fact that you can see it proves that there is light…’cause you can’t see a shadow in the dark.

what does your shadow experience tell you?

please check it out, and give him some comment love.

that rings true with me, because for the longest time i’ve had the weirdest feeling about the whole idea of “praise and worship.” please don’t get me wrong: i love to worship god, and i love to sing…and i feel like music is a great method to connect with and feel the presence of god. but every time i hear somebody say “after the worship we’ll receive the offering” or “then pastor preached, and then we worshipped some more” it just makes me cringe. it implies that when we sing, we are worshipping, and the time before and after we are exempt. but it’s crucial to examine the way we treat our families (reserving them enough time and attention, building them up, giving sacrificially), interact with people (at work, in the grocery line, shopping on the day after thanksgiving, in our cars sitting in traffic, and on the phone with customer support!), practice business ethically, manage our money (being good stewards of what we are given, living beneath our means, tithing at least 10% to our local church and giving cheerfully from our overflow), do our work (this means me when i was working in the produce department at kroger, it means students doing the best they can on their homework, etc.), open our hearts and minds to what god may say to us, and seek his will for our lives. worship means a lot more than singing our guts out.

on a related note, because worship has so much to do with the posture of our heart and the way that overflows into how we live our lives, it really as very little to do with what songs we sing or what style they are…or whatever. that’s why churches who are really concerned with spreading the gospel of christ (((and i’m gonna make some people really mad here))) gear the style of music and presentation of the message to unchurched, non-followers of christ. christ followers understand that their focus on christ is what makes worship meaningful. non-christians don’t care about that, but they can get into an incredible music experience or an engaging, relevant message presentation. think about it. if you’re not at least trying to do that, then you don’t care about non-believers feeling at home in your church. bottom line.

back to my main point, if you are a follower of christ, i encourage you to sing your guts out (yes) at your church, but also to make an effort to honor god with what you do…everything you do. (easy for me to say…right? i struggle with it, too. honestly, at times i just plain suck at it.) if you do that, then you will be a true worshipper, and when you sing during “praise and worship” you’ll experience a god connection that is all the more real and engaging and wonderful…and it won’t matter if you don’t know or like the song. try that on for size.

pretty cool thoughts about teaching your children to worship here, as well as some thoughts on “untraining career Christians” that really mirror my own. I must admit that I got a little bit choked up when I saw the photo and read the last few lines of that post…thinking about teaching my daughter about worshipping god. she isn’t old enough to sing yet, but she waves her hands…I thought I heard her speaking in tongues the other day, but then I remembered she doesn’t know any word yet other than “dada, mama, that, this” and sometimes “yes.”

anyway read the post.

this is what it looked like during the song which was the highlight of the evening for me last night (sunday night, easter) at buckhead church. it was a song i had never heard before. so i came home and looked up the few lyrics that i remembered… i’ll try to post audio of the song very soon. here are the lyrics. enjoy.

He is jealous for me
Loves like a hurricane
I am a tree
Bending beneath
The weight of his wind and mercy
When all of a sudden
I am unaware of these
Afflictions eclipsed by glory
And I realize how beautiful you are
And how great your affections are for me

Oh how he loves us so
Oh how he loves us
How he loves us so

Yeah he loves us
Oh how He loves us

We are his portion
And he is our prize
Drawn to redemption by the grace in his eyes
If grace is an ocean we’re all sinking
So heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss
And my heart burns violently inside of my chest
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets
When I think about the way
He loves us

Oh how he loves us so
Oh how he loves us
How he loves us so

Yeah he loves us
Oh how he loves us

i got the above image from carlos whittaker’s blog. check him out.