Today I smashed the hang out of my fingers. I creamed ’em like a fool when I tried to lower a garage door by sticking my fingers into the handy little crack between the panels. So when the door came down, the crack closed, and I was left with the three middle fingers of each hand stuck in the door while I yelled, danced and pleaded for someone to help. Now my digits are traumatized with bruised and bleeding fingernails on each hand, and I’m typing this entry very gently, favoring certain fingers like a dog with a wounded leg.

The bummer is, tomorrow night I have a special Christmas performance. So I’ve enlisted some prayer warriors, and I’m believing for God to heal me up enough to go through with it. It’s really amazing how often things like this happen to me before a concert. It makes me feel like there’s some kind of spiritual assignment against me playing in public.

I was thinking about this today, wondering why people connect with my music in the first place. It’s definitely not my technique. You can find people all over the county who effortlessly play circles around me, executing flawless passages and dazzling arpeggios. The only thing I can figure out is, maybe it’s my passion. I have a tendency of losing myself in the music and forgetting about the world around me. And people seem to like that. We love passion because we’re created in the image of a passionate God. Yet our lives can be so incredibly mundane. So when an audience hears someone get lost in some foggy Neverland, and then emerge on the other end beating the keyboard black and blue, they respond.

Sometimes I get choked up, or even cry right in the middle of a piece. Other times I’ve played hard enough to leave a trail of blood on the keyboard. (And sometimes I make loud, bombastic mistakes that cause the audience to squirm and twist in their seats). Of course this can be embarrassing, but if I live in fear of tenderness, or even of large, monstrous mistakes, everything will come across sounding tentative and tame. And neither life nor music was meant to be played that way.

Baxter Kruger says, “there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who are full of crap and know it, and those who are full of crap and don’t know it.” Maybe that explains why my life has felt so messy these past few years. I think I’m somewhere along the journey of owning up to it.

The Father’s love just won’t allow me to live in denial.

You ought to see deacon Jones
When he rattles the bones,
Old parson Brown dancin’ ‘roun like a clown,
Aunt Jemima who is past eighty three,
Shoutin’ “I’m full o’ pep!
Watch yo’ step!, watch yo’ step!
One legged Joe danced aroun’ on his toe,
Threw away his crutch and hollered, “hey let ‘er go!”
Oh, honey, hail! hail! the gang’s all here
For an Alabama jubilee.

George Cobb:
Alabama Jubilee

Last Sunday evening we Presbyterians experienced an extraordinary time of worship. Having been prepped in the morning service, the people returned in the evening toting musical instruments and expecting “something a little different.”

For me it was a risk: setting up a worship experience where people would be absolutely free to follow their heart. We put a few Psalms on the screen, and read together passages about singing new songs, dancing, clapping and praising God with cymbals and harps. And somewhere along the line the great Maestro stepped into the our unfettered mess of musicality, tapped his baton, and conducted a delicious symphony of freedom like I’ve seldom seen: Young and old alike entered the steps and strains, accompanied by flutes and violins, djembes and shakers. It was a chorus of joy that couldn’t be explained apart from the living God.

I’m in awe that our God is a Trinity, a three-personed Godhead pulsing with relationship between Father, Son and Spirit. I love the rhythms of life that pour from His throne, the eternal inclusion, the harmony and agreement of being Three – and yet – One.

It all goes back to the Trinity, the fountainhead of harmony, the root of relationship, the cradle of creativity, and the origin of the dance. How lonely and flat the universe would be, how quiet the jubilee, were it any other way.

Hmm… Even though I really do believe in what I wrote yesterday, the judgmental, know-it-all attitude is downright ugly. Railing against skewed ideas with an attitude of pride and judgment is so unlike Jesus. Please forgive me, and feel free to remind me when I start sounding so pompous.

Christian bookstores – once a haven of rest for my thirsty soul – have begun to irritate me like a splinter in the eye.  Here’s why:

Christian bookstores have become to me an awkward symbol of our artificially divided thinking:

• We have the “Lord’s” day, and then we have (other) days.
• We speak of the “Lord’s” work, and then our (secular) work.
• We refer to our “Christian” life, and – presumably  – our regular life
• We value “Christian” art, and devalue every other kind of art.
• And we bathe ourselves in “Spiritual” music while eschewing pop, classical, country, and jazz music.

It’s almost as if we live in two completely different worlds: The “Christian world”, and the actual world!

Which brings us to “Christian” bookstores: The ultimate expression of a divided world,  where each book is sanctified, certified and bona fide.  Our local stores in Florence offer Christianized teddy bears, scripturized school supplies, sanctified jewelry, religified trinkets, and  ultra-sanitized fiction.

But here’s the honest truth:  There is only one world. And there are only books. Some, written by believers, are rich with truth.  Others, written by non-believers, contain rich truths as well. Sometimes believers get things wrong, and sometimes unbelievers get things right, because believers do not own the copyright on truth.  Rather the Truth holds a copyright on us.  And the Truth, (who is a person), is well able to teach us along the way. At this point I’m becoming convinced that the drivel in our Christian bookshops can be as spiritually  damaging as the worst of Barnes and Nobel.

The answer is simple: strip away the arbitrary titles and embrace discernment.  Drink deeply from books, art, and music which reflect the glory of God regardless of categories. The important question is not “Did a Christian write this, paint this, sing this, but rather does this thing reflect the glory of our beautiful God?