HCLM BLOG

What the heck is worry, anyway?  I mean, we do it all the time, right?  But what is worrying.  I thought about that for a while and realized that the only thing you can worry about is the future.  Think about it; you can't worry about the past, because you already know what's happened, and you can't worry about your immediate present, because what's here is here.  In fact, by definition, you can only worry about the future.  

That's really interesting because, as I thought about it further, I realized that there is no such thing as the future.  The past definitely happened, and the present (you reading this) is definitely happening, but show me the future...you can't.  What's interesting is that once the future is actually a reality, it's the present.  I mean, sure we can do our best to predict the future, but anyone who's ever trusted a weather man knows all too well that what will actually happen could be quite different.  The bottom line: the future as we understand it only exists in our imaginations; it is not something that is actually real at all.

So if we can only worry about the future, but what we call "the future" is really our own imaginations running rampant, then what are we actually worrying about?

I love this verse in Matthew 6:34, where Jesus says, "Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don't get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow.  God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes."

I've known people who all their lives were worried about what could happen, and therefore could never really enjoy what was happening.    I've always thought it was interesting that when God met Moses in the desert, and Moses asked who He was, God replied "I AM".  I think that so perfectly describes who God is in our lives.  He's not "I WAS" or "I WILL BE", but He is the 'right-here-right-now' God; the God that IS.  If you want to find God, you won't find Him in your own ideas about the future, and you won't find Him the stagnant past.  He can only be found right here, right in this moment, where things are real and alive and moving.  That's what God's about, and that's what we can be about.  Make the choice to keep yourself right here, right now where God is.  Let tomorrow worry about itself.

Have you ever thought of looking at the world as an extra-terrestrial would?  It's really interesting, because you realize that some of the most common things you do are actually really weird.  For instance, think of how an alien would describe the world that we live in; it's filled with boxes.  We sleep on a box, within a box called a room, which is part of a bigger box called a house.  That house box is just one of many house boxes lined up in long rows and intersections which, from an ariel view are often arranged in the shape of a giant box!  In the mornings we hurriedly transition from our stationary box (house) to our mobile box (car) in order to go to another box (work).  Once we return from work, we spend the rest of our day in front of any one of a series of glowing boxes; TV, computer, microwave, etc.  Also, have you ever thought of looking at the layout of the average American house from an alien's perspective.  Think of the way that everything is arranged around the TV, which is quite often "high and exalted" upon it's own separate little stand or up on the wall.  Add to that all the time that most of us sit in front of the thing, and how hard would an alien really have to think to come to the conclusion that our TVs are an object of worship?

It's amazing how much a different perspective can change the way that you see/live your life.  I know that, as I share my moment-by-moment life with God, I am able more and more to step out of my own little world and see the big picture; to see stuff as it really is.  I think that so often we fill up our lives with all kinds of junk that doesn't even matter, but we do it and say it and think it and watch it because it's "what your supposed to do".  But every day I am blown away at how God can strip away all the "fluff" and reveal things for what they truly are.

If you're reading this and you haven't been outside of a box all day; throw that alien's observations for a loop and get some fresh air :)

Howdy everyone, Daniel here!

So I've been here for a few months now, and I'm sure a lot of you have seen me on Sunday mornings playing with the band for worship.  However, most of you probably would not guess that, until very recently--as in the last coupla weeks--I couldn't read a single note of music.  Now, when I say music, I'm referring to musical notation or, as I've always referred to it, "dot-dot-dots", cause that's pretty much all that it meant to me:)  Several weeks ago, however, I went to my mom's house over in Edgewater, and found that my fourteen year-old sister Elisabeth could read musical notation, and was able to play songs straight from "Phantom of the Opera" (they had the song book for it).  She sounded so wonderful that in that moment, I put aside two decades-worth of resistance to the "dot-dot-dots", and asked her to show me how to read it.  

Since then, I've been practicing diligently to get this musical notation stuff down.  I'm currently writing a piano piece so that I'm forced to learn where all the notes go and what all the little symbols mean.  In doing this, I've really begun to realize how amazing music is.

Have you ever thought about that?  Until very, very recently in human history, all music was played live: no CD's, no radio, no cassette tapes, no vinyls, nothing.  If you wanted music, you had to create it.  In our modern-day culture, music is blared everywhere we go from restaurants to the car next to us at the stop light.  It seems that our culture is overflowing with music, maybe even too much.  Music is cheap, it's easy, and it's entertaining.  But this was not always so.

Think about the world before electricity, before cars, before cities; back to the world where we began.  It was a quiet world.  Anyone who has been in the woods for several days at a time knows what I'm talking about.  There is an engulfing silence that seems to fill up the wilderness, and after you've been immersed in it long enough you feel as if it may even consume you.  We don't often experience this today, because we have created a world that is filled with noise and voices and music, all directed at us and for us, but it was out of a silent world that music came forth.  In that time, music was too precious, too valuable to play as the background to a soda add, or to be sold for 99 cents on Itunes (not that they had soda or Itunes back then, but hopefully you get my point).  Music was something sacred; something that had the ability to pierce through the darkness and the fears and the silence and bring something that was not of this world, something that could touch the heart in a way that is deeper than the eye can see.

Music is a way that we can express the infinite movements of the human heart into the physical world.