A comparison of amateurs

Three well-known YouTube amateurs, all singing the same song. The easiest test: compare keys/high notes.

• Megan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8tUjj7SDog
• Tiffany: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLpMkBN68rg
• Christina: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enmaJnpX5sk

I think this pretty much sums up the amateur YouTube star battle. And this is definitely not even Christina’s best video. Other pretty superb ones (that are amateur-ly done, instead of the Kurt Schneider + Sam Tsui cover of Nelly’s “Just a Dream”):

• Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain”
• Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”

 

Two great reminders that grace is everything

Today I came across two great articles — posted by IV friends from Virginia Tech and Duke — that reminded me about how grace is everything. They are (1) “Quiet time performance” and (2) “reflections on Judas.” They provide good cause for reflection for ME but I wouldn’t judge for just reading the two articles and skipping my own stuff!

“Quiet time performance” is something I have definitely experienced and continue to. The effect or mindset described here shows up in my ministry/staff work too. This attitude of working for God’s blessing cripples me in both areas because it makes me (the one who heard God’s calling) more central/crucial than God (the One who spoke it).

It’s why I have such high expectations, it’s what drives the destructive/burn-out-prone part of my work ethic — if I don’t do it, if I’m not the best, then nothing will happen or everything will fail. On the flip side, if things succeed, it goes to show that excellence and hard work are necessary. So get back to work.

While I definitely struggle with pride and over-importance, I think in my personal life with Jesus, I struggle with this Judas complex – I keep blaming myself, I keep feeling ashamed, I feel like giving up when it comes to sin, or lack of consistency in my devotional life, or what have you. I either wallow and get mad at myself (and/or sometimes I think that I’m supposed to be mad at myself, because God must be mad since He expects so much of me, right?) or become apathetic (because it’s easier to dissociate and disengage than face shame and guilt).

Instead of high demands to achieve, it also drives apathy, laziness, and passivity — when things don’t go as planned, when things become unpredictable, and especially when things just… don’t move, then what’s the use in doing anything?Why pray? Why read scripture? Why move? I’ll just go days without trying to connect with God. Why bother if I can’t feel Him personally?

And I have come to this conclusion before — particularly back in mid-December. But I think that I need to re-enter disciplines. And just show up. And just be there. Because if it’s about receiving grace, Jesus has already given it to me. Even if I never feel Him ever again, I have it. And paradoxically, because devotional life isn’t something I have to do, maybe I can do it again even if I don’t feel anything.

 

Easter with T.S. Eliot

First, I’m thankful for Matt L — who’s taking the same T.S. Eliot course I was in last spring with my favorite Duke English professor — because he’s been posting up quotes of Eliot poems occasionally. They’ve been helpful for me this Holy Week, partly because I have feel very emotionally, mentally, and spiritually not-present with the Easter season. I feel not-here, I feel disconnected from the culmination of the Christian year, probably out of my own dry spiritual sense. Thus, Matt’s postings have reminded me of how much I enjoyed the later Eliot poems, focused on the Christian journey.

I find companionship in Journey of the Magi (“a cold coming we had of it…) and Song of Simeon (“I am tired of my own life and the lives of those after me”) as they lament the hardship and the dryness. Ash-Wednesday is a sort of vicarious/companion play-act of confession or contrition (“I do not hope to turn again… I rejoice that things are as they are”). I enjoy most in Ash-Wednesday the humble, pitiful cry/confession: “Lord, I am not worthy / Lord, I am not worthy / but speak the word only.” Indeed, God’s speaking overcomes, overwhelms our unworthiness and fills up every crack.

Finally, I spent the last part of the morning’s “devotional” reading Marina – which was the end-piece of my paper on T.S. Eliot (sort of a survey of Eliot’s Christian journey). The narrator can hardly believe that he is come to the distant unseen shore that he’s sailed after for so long — “What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands / What watter lapping the bow / And scent of pine” etc. And how appropriate for Good Friday and Easter Sunday:

    Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the humming-bird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the stye of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death

Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place

And even as the journey may be hard — “Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat… The rigging weak and the canvas rotten” – it’s all right. Marina is a welcome word to me, because the “place” I am in spiritually is so like a desert, but what Marina describes is the experience of grace and God’s love as a misty wonderful woodland shore. I am eager for a place so full of God’s presence that it is described as “grace dissolved.” That is a welcome Easter reminder.

 

Craving the mundane

I know of course the golden period of calling and this mission lasts only so long. And then we are forced to grapple with the varying weapons that hardship employs against us — from inane inconveniences to profound pain — in addition to rending questions and mysteries that seem to undo our every prayer and plan. We at some point must give up the simple view and let the complex impossibility (or impossible complexity) of it all break us into a submission to God that can survive anything. I know the golden age (or honeymoon period) has to end.

It has been a string of successive mounting frustrations. The random little things — internet/modem breaking for no good reason and wasting hours on the hone, losing my social security card God knows when, having my GPS (and UVA hat, for goodness’ sake…) stolen two weeks ago because the passenger door has a faulty lock. The deeper pains — the anxiety/depression-inducing displacement from community and a spiritual home, and having to process (and shortly, help students process) the sudden death of a 1st-year student in the Christian community.

Today a desire occurred to me that I’d never had before.

In light of these, for the first time, I craved mundanity. I craved a mundane, risk-free, pain-free type of ministry where everyone and everything is perfect or simple. I craved a job where deep profound spiritual things and the dynamics of guiding and shaping them were replaced by the simple predictability of something far more tractable, and lucrative maybe. I craved the quietude of dullness and the groundedness of things/life-not-bound-up-in-God’s-Holy-and-mysterious-mission.

But then of course I know that God has more than that for us. And maybe even now as I’m typing out this last sentence or two, I must force myself to calm down and realize that this crashing wave is just a ripple and today I am feeling like an ant. And if I sleep and wake tomorrow the beach will be quiet and bright even with the calling, cross, and mission still in tow.

 

By Filling Our Lack

This is a sermon I heard last fall at Trinity Presbyterian Church where I’ve been attending all year. I was really encouraged by the message of unconditional grace. I mean that’s what grace is isn’t it?! Unconditional! Joe Ho, my area director/boss once said to me that “the reason Paul has to bring up the clauses of ‘should we go on sinning’ is because the message of grace is THAT insanely unconditional. If grace is explained properly, you should be left so confused as to how people don’t fall into licentious behavior. Grace is THAT incredible.”

Indeed it is! Have a listen here to the sermon — Thompson does such an excellent job of explaining how our life with God is both possible and fulfilling because Jesus fills our lack.

Greg Thompson (Trinity) – By Filling Our Lack