varying degrees of light

If you're reading through Firefox, I apologize for the font and size crazy. I've tried some different things. I hope it's pleasing to read from where you are.

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OK. To answer the query I just posited on facebook...

No. It is not easy to start writing with Wu-Tang streaming through your headphones. Have you ever tried to clarify the lyrics or melody to a song while another song was playing? It's damn near freaking impossible. So you can imagine trying to find the words to express what you felt today while this is pouring into your head,

Yo RZA, yo razor!
Hit me with the major
The damage, my Clan understand it be flavor
Gunnin, hummin comin atcha
First I'm gonna getcha, once I gotcha, I gat-cha
You could never capture the Method Man's stature
For rhyme and for rapture, got niggaz resigning, now master
my style? Never! I put the fucking buck in the wild kid, I'm terror
Razor sharp, I sever
the head from the shoulders, I'm better
than my compeda, you mean competitor, whadeva!
Let's get together

It doesn't work too well. But you sit back and let the track finish and keep up on the chat until it does.

I went to GIFT for the first time since sophomore year tonight. Robert Minto had a short piece in the last Diamond about the idea of unity in the various worship venues that Dordt campus has to offer. He called out how a lot of Dordt students see GIFT, Wellspring, Praise and Worship and Chapel. I know I thought of them all as separate services before and attended Wellspring even less than I had attended Chapel before, and GIFT or PW much less... if at all. OK, except that I was in a Wednesday night PW band freshman year (very sexy) with Andrew Voss (very sexy) and Brando Huisman and Bethany pre-Keep and Heather and Heather. So I was there when we, you know, played. The point is that I miss playing... wait, let me make sure I mean what I'm about to type. I miss playing praise and worship songs. I miss praise and worship.
And, for those of you who might not know this already, a large part of my life (about five or six years) was driven by praise and worship. I learned guitar with the hopes to play in youth group, but they needed someone to play the newly purchased bass (a sweet, lovely black Washburn that I hope they still have) so I did that for years, with John on the drums, then Pete when John moved back to Korea. Andrew took over on bass, tore it up, and I played back-up guitar with Min and Dan leading... and then, with little variation in the band, I led for almost a year (I think). Jean on keyboards, teaching me to sing. Rachel and Priscilla on vocals. James from time to time. Mikey took over on drums when Peter and David and Jean went off to college. My best friends were playing drums and bass and keyboard and on vocals and we lived all week together, culminating our experience and angst and gratitude twice every weekend leading praise and worship. (We were really good.)
It's good, I think, to ask "What is worship?" for so many years as a stupid, young kid. Not that all young kids are stupid; I was. It leads to good discussion and deliberate actions every week - practicing, playing, singing and praying songs with a trusting group of people. Did we do enough? No, of course not. Do we do enough now? No, of course not. But the point is that I grew up in a Christian setting - the Korean Christian Grand Rapids scene - that had praise and worship as its foundation. (Brothers, am I wrong? Is it different now?) I moved to Iowa and found that, even within the CRC, white people do praise and worship differently, which is a whole different conversation. Maybe it was the move to Iowa as much as it was me "growing up" and "maturing" but I got tired and disgusted with large groups of North American youth raising their hands and singing poorly written songs as an expression of love to a Lord and Savior - an activity that could very easily be mistaken for having a pleasing emotional and self-serving time with your friends. (Singing in a group is therapeutic. Live music is fun. It's easy to convince yourself that this is good for the soul, but is it challenging and genuine?) I was that guy, that North American scum, for so many years in my life and believed that the most faithful and righteous action we could perform was praise and worship.
OK. I know a large part of the change was from a closer examination of some popular CCM songs. We don't need to talk about those... Every Move I Make? Really? I was a counselor at Dordt Discovery Days two summers ago (summer camp for pre-high school Christian kids... a fun time and a serious recruiting avenue) and encouraged my group to sing at the nightly praise and worship sessions around the fire, but I literally cringed when we sang this song and -horribly - I wondered if singing these words, adding the motions and filler-sound effects made them simplify their understanding of their relationship with Christ. I wondered if it made them stupid. Cushy Christian homes in cushy Christian suburbs, man.
I felt that GIFT (Growing in Faith Together) and mid-week Praise and Worship were high school worship sessions... largely for the people in college that never "grew out," or got sick, of high school worship. As they are, arguably, the two best-attended ministry sessions on campus, it's an indication of what the larger student body wants in worship - and for those that don't, they're showing, with much smaller numbers at Wellspring, that they are the minority, or they don't really care. They're not voting. Don't get me wrong - some of my best friends regularly attend GIFT and/or PW and I've done some grumbling about the lack of worship diversity on campus etc. The idea, however, much larger and more holy significant than my idea of it - thankfully. The auditorium was largely filled tonight with students who weren't expressly required to be in attendance and music was lifted up with what I believe was the genuine hope for glorifying the name of our God. I didn't know a lot of the songs tonight, or most of the people in the band, and - of course - I was distracted by a lot of the technical details/mishaps as well as the questions, again, of worship and service. I was critical of lots of things, noticing decisions that I would have made differently, comparing worship leaders to others I knew and played with - wanting to speak, angrily, to the guy about what it means to lead worship as a servant and not as some sort of vessel having this amazing individual experience of your own that everyone is supposed to, somehow, benefit from. Put your hands down, sir. Open your eyes and sing into the microphone so the people that came to worship won't be distracted and worried about which verse they're on.

"There's a typo on the screen. They should really get somebody who knows the flow of the songs to work the Powerpoint. There should be a better program for this than Powerpoint. I miss using overhead projectors. Why is there such a glaring, awkward pause in between songs? Why don't they do something about that? Why isn't the lead singing into the microphone? Why isn't that other girl singing into the microphone? I don't even know what their voices sound like. Why do they call this Growing in Faith? There has to be a better, more fitting, more accurate acronym for what this is. Shoot, I don't know this song either. They're looking at each other like they don't know when to end the song. Did they not practice enough? Is that the American flag on the side of the stage? Is that the Iowa flag next to it? Iowa has a flag?"

Etc. All very distracting. It's unfair already to judge, but it's REALLY unfair to judge a new band off of one night at a relatively early part of the year. Afterward, a new freshman friend (Paul Alberts) said that, based on his first impression of GIFT, tonight, he probably wouldn't be back. I wanted to encourage him to give it another try, to come with us again next week, but I hesitated because I realized that I probably said the exact same thing when I was a freshman. I don't want my freshman friend to go because I want him to go... I'm not even sure I want him to go. I know I don't want him to go if he feels obligated to, or that he thinks he should for some bullshit reason... OK. I do want him, after processing his decisions and humility and desires, to go but, moreso, I want him to be unsatisfied with a Christian lifestyle that ends in praise and worship - or any other session that is designed for an exclusively Christian audience.