Mental Musings

Boldness was something I learned how to master at an early age. By the time I was six, I had no trouble speaking up in Sunday School. I had no trouble speaking up in my class at school. I had no trouble speaking up to strangers (something we now teach our children to avoid). I had no trouble speaking up in front of a crowd. Actually, I had no trouble speaking up anytime or anywhere. My parents called me motor mouth. From the moment I got out of bed until the moment I went to sleep again, if there was someone around me, I felt it my calling in life to talk about everything. My first grade teacher complimented me one day for keeping quiet 5 minutes during naptime. My parents put a limit on how many words I was allowed to say at the dinner table. Even friends would get annoyed with me because I rarely gave them time to get in a word. Talking seemed to be something over which I had no control. It was like my mouth was a funnel with a direct link to my thoughts. Anything I thou...

“Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct Him? Let him who accuses God answer Him!” Job 40:2 There is an issue that has concerned me greatly for more than twenty years: Situational Ethics. I probably first encountered it while working with teens as a youth pastor. There I was holding notes from a well-prepared bible study on the Ten Commandments and I was shocked beyond belief that I could not get a simple “yes” or “no” answer to a question that should have been a no-brainer: “Is murder wrong?” The all basically said that it depends. The answers that this group of teens gave showed that they had given this some thought. One felt that if someone threatened your life it was acceptable to kill him or her. We ruled that out as self-defense, not murder. Others said that if someone killed or raped your sister, murder was okay. One person brought up how if we could know in advance that the person was going to do something evil, such as Hitler, that it would be fine to kill t...

It is amazing how much your life changes when that first bundle of joy arrives. You can prepare yourself some by reading books, but they never tell you the whole story. For instance, the books say that you should expect to need anywhere from 3-5 outfits per day for your newborn. What they don’t tell you is that you should expect anywhere from 3-5 outfits per day for the parents as well. I began to realize that changes where going to take place before Ashton was even born. Wendy was about 2 months along when she informed me one day as we were driving around through the traffic of Amman, Jordan, that I would have to quit yelling the word “stupid” at other drivers after the baby was born. It was at that moment that I first wondered if I was really ready for this baby. Since then, I have really tried hard to control myself while driving. But I must say that there are some really stupid people in this world and for some reason they always seem to be on the road at the same time t...

I wrote this 15 years ago and it was published in The Church Musician in 1997 by LifeWay . A framed copy hangs in my office, but I doubt many people have actually stood there long enough to read it. I have served in various churches as the Minister of Music, both on a part-time and a full-time basis. I have worked with children's choirs, youth choirs, and adult choirs. I have led small ensembles and large ensembles. I have even worked with soloists. And with all of these groups I have developed a new liturgical litany: "Please over-pronounce your consonants so that we will be singing to God and not to gah." But after several months (and even years) of this litany, I still must drone on about the importance of correct pronunciation with every new piece of music that is rehearsed. I will admit that I am the last person who could be considered an authority on the correct pronunciation of words in the English language. I have a verbal history of mispronunciations in vi...

If you spend enough time with someone they will eventually get on your nerves. We all have our little irritating habits: biting nails, tapping fingers, interrupting others, eating the last chocolate chip cookie, etc. And we have all had someone bend our last nerve to the point of breaking. Sometimes people seem to just do stupid things at the worst possible time. It is then that we find ourselves in a difficult situation dealing with difficult people. Russia has been sending cosmonauts into space to live on a huge structure with very little living space. Here in the U.S., NASA has been studying the effects of living in cramped quarters for long periods of time. The eventual goal of both nations is to build a space station that would be home to scientists and a launching port for a trip to Mars. But the concern is how well people will react toward each other and their job when they have very little space and must see the same people day in and day out. The recent news of the ...

Well, I did it. I actually made it to Chick-fil-A for lunch today. It may not have been the best thing to do only two days after surgery, but no harm done. The hardest thing was the ride there and sitting in a straight back chair to eat lunch. We now have two Chick-fil-A's in our county, but we still went to the original one in the Constant Friendship Shopping Center. The owners, Michael and Shannon Mcferren were members of our church until they went as part of a church plant that we launched just over a year ago. My wife helped me find a seat and she went to order. She said that people standing in line were talking to complete strangers as if it was a big party of friends (maybe just a little of what it will be like when we all get to heaven). She saw someone we know from our homeschool co-op who wanted Wendy to know that she was praying for me. Boy was it crowded. The drive through line was circling around the building and out into the roadway. Cars were trying to ...