Breaking the Silence

I’ve been hiding.

Did you notice?

At first, I just convinced myself I was busy - busy revisiting education goals, busy de-cluttering, busy scraping peeling paint.

When I did sit down at the computer, I wouldn’t even load the blog software. I would follow rabbit trails on the web and spend time answering impossible quizzes and playing fun balloon popping games. (Warning: These sites are highly addictive, and complete time wasters!)

Why did I not want to post on my own blog?

Because some of you who read it, know us and might find our current struggles disheartening, even hurtful.

You see, our church recently hired a new, vibrant, energetic, amazingly passionate pastor. He has a wildly awesome vision for our little downtown church. There are exciting things happening there and you can sense that even more will come.

We’re just not sure that we’re supposed to be a part of that new vision. It’s exciting, and wonderful, but not necessarily what excites us.

We’ve been without a pastor for two years. For two long years, MrPages and I helped carry the worship load with some amazingly gifted and talented people. It has been a privilege to serve with them. But that role is now done and we have suddenly found ourselves without any role at all in our church. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just a different thing for us.

And we are feeling that restlessness again. Perhaps you’ve experienced it too. The sense that God is calling you to something, but the vision isn’t quite clear yet. The idea that something isn’t quite right, but you’re not sure what’s wrong.

The last couple of times we’ve had it have been pretty life changing:

• we moved half-way across the country
• we started a youth group two weeks after we found a new church
• we decided to homeschool
• we started worshipping as a family, which meant our children didn’t go to Sunday school anymore (because it happened during worship)
• we bought a forty year old house that needed more work than imaginable

What has God got in store for us? Why the restlessness? Where are we supposed to be serving? If not at our current church home, then where? If we’re supposed to stay, then how do we serve in the areas where we’re passionate, without being divisive?

So many questions, and so few answers. Just the restlessness.

And so I’ve been hiding.

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Here is an interesting interview with Shane Hipps that looks at Understanding how visual media influences us..

There’s some pretty heady stuff in there, and the article only scratches the surface of the whole argument. He calls forth Marshall McLuhan and if you look in Hipps’ new book (it’s on my amazon wish list, but I don’t have it yet) I’d be willing to bet you’ll find references to Neil Postman too.

The idea is that visuals (and songs) have a power that we need to be aware of. This power is pure out and out manipulation, and video can have the power of manipulation even if we don’t intend it to. Advertising has trained people to be receptive to unstated messages. This can be very useful, or, in the case of Christianity, it can be very evil. We’re not here to trick people or push them into confessing Christ.

Neither Hipps nor I are advocating dropping video or music. He works for a company that provides visuals and I play on a worship team. The important issue is that we step back and look at the manipulation factor of our methods. We need to study people like McLuhan and Postman who have put a lot of thought into the impact media has on the world around us.

Britney Spears knows how to bring a crowd to its feet and bring it to its knees and bring it to a place of weepy contemplation. But when a worship set does these things, we are awed by “the power of the Spirit” instead of what can sometimes be attributed to the power of a properly planned set. I played in bar bands. I know all about planning sets to achieve maximum effect. The question we need to ask before preparing a video or a set is: do I have an agenda to push that I have the talent to achieve, or am I going to relax and pray and let the Spirit guide me to pick songs that people need to hear, or images that people need to see? It can be a very difficult thing to let go of the perfect video clip for a sermon, or the song you love that you’ve been practicing and dying to get into service, but we need to make sure that our choices don’t overrule the important stuff.

The Spirit can move people through music and video, I have no doubt. It is essential, though, that we are aware of (and remove) all traces of our own manipulation from these things to let the Spirit speak for Himself.

I was thinking yesterday about how my skills don’t really translate into a world without computers. The end result of my work is a customer that doesn’t need me. That’s it. I don’t have a product that I can point to and say “I made that.”

Recently, a web page that I help run had some art contests. I entered all four: photoshopping an image, photography, poetry and multimedia art (painting, sculpture, woodwork, etc).

I haven’t been this excited in a long time. Walking around with a camera looking for some photographs to take was a great experience. Everything around me was a potential photograph, and I studied everything with an intensity that was almost scary.

The poetry writing was so much fun. I read a lot, and I write this blog, but that’s it. To have to sit and really think about each individual word, and try to convey an emotion other than the cheap laughs I try for here… it was wonderful exercise for the grey matter.

The most fun I had was in creating an art piece on the topic of “Birds”. I had planned a model of a bird made out of flattened tin cans, but it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. I decided I’d try to use up some of the plumbing fittings that I had in the basement, and I built a copper sculpture of a goose. It worked out far better than I thought it might. It was tremendous fun and nevermind if it’s great art or not, holding this finished piece in my hands makes me grin from ear to ear. “I made this!”.

(click the picture for larger view)

I think I need to do more of this. Create, for no reason other than creation itself. We all do.

What have you made recently?

I often think this as we put on our historical outfits and go to events with our local Historical Re-enacting group. We dress and act like it’s 1815, and the tourists watch, and we have a good time.

But really, I have no idea what I’d do in 1815. My eyes are so bad, I’d be nearly useless without a very expensive pair of incredibly thick glasses. My skills are primarily in areas that have only been useful as a career in the last 15 years or so. I don’t even really know how to go to the bathroom 200 years ago.

Sure, I can do some things with my hands. I can frame a basement (useless 200 years ago), wire a circuit (useless 200 years ago) and solder plumbing (useless 200 years ago). I’d be the lowest of manual labourers, because I have the skills to work a shovel. Those haven’t changed in the last 200 years. Much.

I know, there are not many skills from then that would transfer forward either, but it still makes me think about how radically different our world is from theirs in such a relatively short time. What are my great-grandkids going to do that makes no sense now? I sit and think about how transitory our time is, right now.

It’s only right NOW that I have the opportunity to parent my kids. Not later. Not when I have a bigger house. Not when I’m done this other work. Not when the messes are all cleaned up. Now is the only now that I’ve got, because things change quickly. Sometimes I get paralyzed with the enormity of that.

It’s a good thing that I live now, not earlier or later. My kids need me now, not earlier or later.

Also, I know how to go to the bathroom here.

WonderfulWorship is a discussion on worship among a number of interested bloggers. Want to join in?

I’ve always had a fascination with the Psalms. The psalmist seems to have gone through just about the entire range of human emotion. You can’t discuss worship at all without referencing the Psalms. You want to talk action? Passion? Heartbreak? Faith? Love? Disappointment? Joy? It’s all in there.

Discussion Point #4 - Tell us about your favorite Psalm.

Is one particular page of the Psalms in your bible a little more worn than others? Paraphrase it in your own personal version. Talk about why a particular Psalm is meaningful to you. Tell us what a Psalm means exegetically. Tell us about a song you love (or that you wrote) based on a Psalm. The sky’s the limit, as long as it has something to do with a single Psalm helping your personal worship.

Pray about your responses, and post them next week (but before Thursday, July 26th). Send me the link to your post on your blog and I’ll create an entry here on Thursday, July 26th with a list of them all. If you wish to include a quick bio or introduction, feel free. This may be some people’s first visit to your site.

Sorry for the delay, things have been pretty busy around here, and for some of you as well. Rather than stress anyone or make anyone feel that they couldn’t participate, I bumped it a week.

timheerebout, who writes the newly created Unceasing Worship blog, has taken up the challenge of answering the difficult first question of the WonderfulWorship series.

His post can be found here.

Thanks timheerabout! I love the passion, and the focus on continuous action. I look forward to hearing more from you.

This is for MrPages, who tries to battle the laundry monster daily…

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Mr Walker has all sorts of cartoons that you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

The cutlery rack in the dishwasher broke. Now a small utensil can fall down, and either prevent the dishwasher sprayer from spinning, or bang around in the bottom of the tub.

Today I fixed it. I used those little locking plastic cable ties. Any hardware store will sell them. MrPages, who calls them zip-ties, buys them in bulk, in all sizes. I’m not sure if he knows how much I raid his stash. These little things are also holding together our rodent and rabbit cages!

So I took a little four inch tie, wrapped it around the broken piece, locked it, clipped it and voila!

No more cutlery banging around, where it is not supposed to be. This little piece of plastic will not come off and it won’t rust. It seems perfectly suited to the job!

We are designing our own grammar word games, based on Mad Libs. Being the cheap thrifty individuals we are, creating them ourselves seems so much more pleasing, and is probably more educational.

Here’s our first one:
The Cat Came Back Ad Libitum

We print out a copy and fold it along the center line. The children fill in the blanks, choosing verbs, nouns, and so on, as directed. Then they open up the page and read the silly story out loud. If you are ecologically minded, or cheap thrifty, like us, you can place the folded sheet in a page protector and have the children write their choices on a scrap piece of paper, thereby saving paper and pennies.

PS: Due to copyright infringement we have called our word games Ad Libitums which is Latin for “as you wish.”

Last week there was a reunion of local people involved in mission trips to Nicaragua. We set up at a local park, and had a barbecue and games of frisbee and all the usual picnic things. Two Nicaraguan ministers joined us on their way to a conference in Saskatchewan. It was a wonderful chance to meet a lot of people that I travelled with, and also people that I have only “met” before through blog comments. A good time was had by all.

While we were all standing around chatting and laughing, though, a gentleman approached us and cheerfully invited us to come join his group’s “ice cream run”, an all-ages 5k run sponsored by his running club, followed by ice cream and socializing. He was enthusiastic and polite and actually made me excited enough to go back to his group and get some information on his club.

As I was walking back to my lawn chair I was struck by the thought that we, a group of actively mission-loving Christians, were just evangelized by a running club. We did nothing in return, and it never struck any of us to say a word to any of the people around us.

This guy was so excited about his club that he was approaching random groups of people in a public park with interesting and delightful talk of how great it made him feel and how much benefit there was. Shouldn’t that be the perfect description of a Christian?

Lord, give me a runner’s faith.