Time for More Mac and Cheese

Last time I was writing about the different ways people eat m&c, and how they sometimes insist that their approach is righter than that of others.

I have been thinking a lot since then about the mac and cheese itself. About what we who have eaten the mac and cheese (some say we have drunk the KoolAid) have in common. What is this thing we have?

macaroni
A type of pasta in the form of short tubes.
(used by Italian-Americans, especially in Philadelphia and New Jersey) A generic term for pasta.

cheese
A dairy product made from curdled or cultured milk.
Any particular variety of cheese.
A piece of cheese, especially one moulded into a large round shape during manufacture.

macaroni and cheese
A savory dish made from cooked macaroni and cheese sauce.


I don't know. Let's go exploring.

I am not sure that M&C is a good metaphor for the Gospel. The thing I am sure of is that the way people have favorite ways to eat it is a good metaphor for the ways Christians express and engage in Christianity.

This I know. It is accepting God's Grace that we have in common. I get in trouble there, but that is okay. The next thing that happens is that someone asks if I mean that those who have not accepted the grace of God are not Christians. I would pretty much say yes to that.

So the Macaroni and Cheese is saying yes to the Christian God and accepting as true the message of the Christian Bible. Maybe that is why mac n cheese is a good metaphor. It is a combined, yet two part thing. Like Christianity is two part. It is hearing the deal and saying yes to it. It is receiving new life and giving worship.

It is a relationship. Macaroni by itself is interesting. Cheese sauce by itself is interesting. But the combination is so much more than the sum of its parts. And so is Christian life.

I think this is going somewhere. I am encouraged, Father. Please continue to develop this in my heart. More to come.

Motown

Really enjoying Pandora Motown this evening. I had forgotten how important this music was to me the first time around.

When I started listening to Pandora a couple of years ago, I started with The Doobie Brothers. Blackwater was one of those songs that was so connected to smoking Swisher Sweets with Peggy at the Pizza Hut. (or was that memory a construct?)

What I am realizing now is that the real music in my gut is what I listened to after high school, not during. And Motown is a huge piece of that. Not just because the only thing playing while training with Phil was the Temps.

Maybe one result is that a lot of hopeless tracks got laid down on my soul. I know the words of those Doors songs come to the surface so easily.

The other result, though, is all of those love songs. All of those praise and worship songs that are so narrowly off the mark. The pop catalog is full of them.

Tonight, Aretha sang a song that was sooooo close. All it took was changing the last line of each chorus, and a couple of personal references in a verse. In one tiny movement, the carnal disappears and the divine finds it's place. The writer was a worshipper, devoted and practiced. Maybe even a worshiper of the Most High. The abandon into the arms of love was right there. Just the wrong arms. So simple to fix. Then when sung, the glory falls.

Father, thank you for the worshipers that you have made us all to be. It is so good to be so right doing what you planned. There are so many things that body parts do that are different from each other. This thing, we were all made to do. And we do it even when we do not know it.

Songs in my head.

I have never talked about songs stuck in your head that somebody has not understood and agreed. It does not happen with speeches, poems, movie lines. It happens with songs. I have Seals & Crofts "Hummingbird" in my head right now. And I am enjoying it as much as the first time I ever heard it. And I am seeing images from 1975.

Songs must be so powerful.

Dad made songs and put them in our heads. He made us compatible with them and made us to make songs.

Dean Robert Evans talked about all of the years he had spent around the college age group and how the one thing they had always had was being surrounded constantly with music. Craig and I said, "Well, of course." The Dean said, "No, not of course. It goes away." How sad that was at the time. To think that days would come when we would turn off the music.

And it is not instrumentals. It is songs. Lieder. Mit WORDS. The music expresses, but not like words. It is the words and music together in our heads that sticks. It is a wonder and a delight to me. I want to know more about how and why that works. I wonder if it is my spirit singing, and my soul hears it and repeats it into my consciousness. But what does that mean then, when the song is "not entirely edifying?" Does my spirit sing bar room ditties to the Holy Spirit? I want to conclude that having any song in my heart is better than being dry, dead and songless. I have been there. I am not there now, by the very grace of God.

Father, thank You that you sing over us. Songs are vital to you, and so they are life to us. This is very good.

Each day brings its opportunities to honor God with decisions or to dishonor Him.
He is worthy of honorable decisions, choices, actions and words. In disregarding God, the service of self is left at the forefront.

The hallmark of life in the Holy Wild is the knowledge of God. There is no gap between living, and knowing the value of the last lived moment. Feedback is immediate, unmistakable and personal. If I have been leaning on the arm of my Beloved, and I begin to pull away as I am distracted from Him by a dead thing and its matching dead place in me, I know NOW that I have sinned. Imagine having your nose filled with the finest perfume, a smell that reminds you that you are home...and then having your nose stuffed full of the scent of death and decay. God did not decide to smell bad. I decided to put my nose where it no longer belongs.

Father, thank You for the indefinable intimacy. Thank you for prayer, the abiding ebb and flow of communication.

Happy New Year

Read something in the last day or so. Something about Ms. Winfrey and a new year meaning that we had another chance to get it right. If there was ever a failed humanist approach to life, that is it. The idea that man has what it takes, if he only gets enough opportunities to prove it to himself and the world. The idea that one day we will witness the life of a man who gets it right.

This is very attractive. We all also know that it would make him a god. We spend a lot of social energy looking for the human who will transcend his humanity and behave like a god worth proving that men have divinity in them. Society tracks the beautiful, because we know that beauty is a trait of the gods. We track the extraordinarily intelligent, the extraordinarily physically gifted, the ones born into generations of wealth and power.

They all fall. They all fail. They all fail to be worthy of worship. But so much hope was invested in them, that when the investment tanks, they become the objects of revulsion, derision. Ms. Winfrey has had to find a way to stay slim, because she becomes the failed god of her worshipers when she puts on weight.

Godhood for mortal men is very hard, and then you die.

But no matter how awful it is to be a human god, it is harder to abandon the illusion that it is possible. That is what it takes to be free, however. Just say, "I am not worthy of any measure of worship. The One who established the need to find One who is worthy of worship already revealed Himself to the whole world. I will only worship the One Who Is Worthy."

I worship You, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. You alone are worthy of all praise, honor, wisdom, authority, love, and grace. May the Name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob receive all the Glory.

Shake Up The Happiness

Santa God. The two ancillary characters look heavenward in supplication. And hopeful grins.

They trust Santa God to do the right thing. They all drink the Kool Aid, and everything turns out wondrously.

All. All praise, honor, glory, power, wisdom and authority belong to God. All worship belongs to Him.

They do not have to understand what it is they are portraying. Something to worship is hard wired for a reason. Worship happens. Worship the wrong god begets a lack of satisfaction begets worship of another wrong god begets a lack of satisfaction. This continues.

Thank you, Father, that you never fail to satisfy, and that you never give up on the worshipers.

Worshipful Devotion

I heard a man say today that his cause had to become everything to him. He said that his cause had to become the reason he slept and the reason he rose from sleep. He said that for his cause to prevail, it must also become the center of the lives of his listeners. He was calling for devotion to the cause.

The world is unbalanced without the success of his cause, so it is reasonable to live an unbalanced life to help bring the world back into equilibrium. He said that he expects his resolve in this great enterprise to significantly increase the chance of his being jailed or assassinated, so great is the power of the of the evil which he opposes.

and this man's cause is not the cause of Christ.

I met a man many years ago who had been a citizen of a country fundamentally opposed to the Gospel of Christ. As this man was personally committed to the cause of Christ, and particularly the cause of Christ for that country, his country was fundamentally opposed to him. Indeed, his country considered him insane and treated him as such, by institutionalizing him.

What is important enough to sacrifice for? Moreso, how is life worth living without something to sacrifice for. The sacrifice makes us different. Sacrifice invites transforming power. Like nothing else is able to.

We so easily aim our selves at the wrong target. Father, help your church stay full of holy oil, staying very near, able to stay lit and illuminating the target for each other and all.

A life sacrificed for a good cause is such a tremendous waste.

Nothing like a great worship song.

Give me love
Give me love
Give me peace on earth
Give me light
Give me life
Keep me free from birth
Give me hope
Help me cope, with this heavy load
Trying to, touch and reach you with,
heart and soul

OM M M M M M M M M M M M M M
M M M My Lord . . .

PLEASE take hold of my hand, that
I might understand you

Won't you please
Oh won't you

Give me love
Give me love
Give me peace on earth
Give me light
Give me life
Keep me free from birth
Give me hope
Help me cope, with this heavy load
Trying to, touch and reach you with,
heart and soul

OM M M M M M M M M M M M M M
M M M My Lord . . .

Won't you please
Oh won't you

Give me love
Give me love
Give me peace on earth
Give me light
Give me life
Keep me free from birth
Give me hope
Help me cope, with this heavy load
Trying to, touch and reach you with,
heart and soul
Give me love
Give me love
Give me peace on earth
Give me light
Give me life
Keep me, Keep me free from birth
Give me hope
Help me cope, with this heavy load
Trying to, touch and reach you with,
heart and soul

OM M M M M M M M M M M M M M
M M M My Lord . . .

George Harrison

Doctrine is Hard To See

The Heart is beating, beating, beating. Right here. I approached and I got swept up in those arms. I got pulled in close. It is a closeness that is never found in human society. There are close approximations. But there is only one Holy Embrace. And it is the very best distraction.

I was trying to think about doctrine, but I got too close. I fell into the gravity well of Love. I was not trying to stay away from my Beloved. I just was not trying to get near. But there I go thinking about doctrine and the divine, and before you know it my head is lifted and there is no resistance. My face is plastered against Him, and he is soaked with my tears. This is the one place that was made for me, so I can rest. This is the safe stable place where nothing is missing. It takes so little effort to enter the presence of the Most High, now that the veil is rent. Now that the blood is spilled.

The really, really cool thing is that He can hold me, and He can hold you. He can hold us both right in the center of His attention, and neither of us is short anything. And neither of us notices the other. Father, you draw me and you catch me. You let me listen to you breathing. Thank you.

Godfrey

I want to find out more about the anointing on music. I have had some music come in new that has had listeners on the floor, and two years later it is still wonderful, but the power is gone. Maybe the power is not gone, but that particular anointing has done it's work here. Maybe it would still bowl over someone else.

Then there is my friend Godfrey Birtill. I will hold him a long time in Heaven. I have been listening to the same GB songs for nearly eight years, and they still take me right there.

Point being, there is a difference. I do not know if the difference is important, or the idea that there is a difference is important.

Anyway, if you do not have it, go out on iTunes and buy everything that Godfrey has to offer. Sit down with people you love, and listen to it. All of a sudden you will realize you are on your feet, with your hands to Heaven and big hot tears streaming down your face. The next time you come to, you will wonder what all the noise is...and you will realize that it is your dancing feet madly thumping the floor.

Lunchtime Post 20101013

Tortellini, Red Wine Vinegar and Black Pepper

Fear was my default setting. It is what you could expect. Well, not really. The default position you would see was controlling behavior.

I realized last week that I have been back in church, in a real pursuit of some aspect of Christianity, for twenty years. Now please understand that most of that was not spent well. (That is a whole 'nother topic.) But I was expecting the process to reset my default. Even now, after "20 years in the Way" I see the same default setting in my soul.

He restores my soul. That is my default expectation, my hope, and a place on which I rest.

I will rejoice in The Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth.

Praise and Worship can not come from my mouth at the same time as controlling words.

So should I control the controlling words, or just keep my mouth full of my response to my Father's loving kindness and tender mercy?