Mental Musings

Another year has come and gone and my little blog continues to plug along. I wanted to make one last post to share the best of 2013, based on shares and reads. If you missed any of these, feel free to share them within your sphere and invite others to join the great and massing throng (said tongue in cheek of course). Sheep and Shepherds - 6 part series on the church, members, ministers, and more. Long Road of Hope - some personal insight into our struggles and how God uses them to help others. Vocal Coaching - some simple steps and resources for teaching voice or even teaching yourself to read music or sing.  Darkness and Light: A Parable - There is a battle taking place all around us. This parable conveys that in a creative way. Victory in Christ - this last minute sermon formed from months of personal study time has been shared throughout the world. Amazing how God works. Happy New Year to all of my readers. May God give you a happy and health 2014. I ...

The number one question I get this time of year is: What's next? Church members want to know what I plan to do now that the Christmas musical is over, choir members want to know what we are doing for Easter, and the pastor wants to know what my plans are for the coming year. Many people get stressed just by being asked what plans they have, but not a worship pastor. Worship pastors always live out of season. While everyone else is planning what to do for the Easter block party, you can bet that your worship pastor is working on the final plans for the Christmas program. While you are enjoying the latest Christmas CD, your worship pastor is probably listening to patriotic music. I know from personal experience that the planning stage for a large Christmas program takes a minimum of 11 months preparation. This past program took almost two years from start to finish. Planning months or even years in advance is necessary in order to complete any large scale project. The old ...

This time of the year is full of devices that are used to tell stories: garlands, wreaths, candy canes, lights, stars, candles, trees, presents, and more. They are mnemonic devices for sharing an important event with others. As my wife puts ornaments on our tree, she could tell the story of each one. Who gave them to us. For her, the physical ornament is a reminder of the giver and timing of the gift. Mnemonic devices are just one way to help us remember. We have written histories, we have photographic histories, we even have video graphic histories, but most of these do not help us feel the reality of those stories. And the story about this season is so important that I think it is wonderful to have so many mnemonic devices to use in telling that story. His Story. The story of Jesus Christ. In our worships services this month, we have revealed two or three different ornaments used to decorate a Chrismon tree . Each white ornament of the Chrismon tree is a monogram represen...

Justin Timberlake Yesterday I was standing in a checkout line at Walmart as I perused the covers of those celebrity magazines. Some are nothing but glamour and glitz with all of the info the fans want to know about their favorite star. Others are full of gossip and slander. The ones that have a "Justin Bieber is Having My Alien Baby" or "Miley Cyrus Gained 150 Pounds" type of headline. I guess it is always open season for invading and publicizing the life of a celebrity, whether it be an actor, musician, athlete, or politician. Most people believe that these individuals gave up their freedom to privacy when they chose to accept large amounts of money to become famous. These celebrities are hounding by the media and paparazzi all because their fans hunger and thirst for the latest gossip and news about them. This in turn started me thinking about how Christians relate to the various celebrities. Does the Christian community take part in the immortalizati...

I am often asked to teach voice lessons for church members. While they are willing to pay for these lessons, I just do not have the time to teach lessons on a regular basis. I often do agree to work with someone for a little while just to give them time to decide if they really want to pay to take lessons from a voice teacher. Music lessons are not cheap, typically $25-40 for a half hour private instruction. Lessons through a college or a specialty music school can cost even more. While many parents are willing to spend this much for their children, they often are wasting their money because their children do not spend the necessary time at home practicing. Unlike a classroom setting where some practice time is built into the lesson plans such as in mathematics, music lessons are not meant to be a time of practice for your child. This was an expensive lesson for me to learn. In High School I drove 90 miles to the University of Southern Mississippi each week to take trumpet le...

I just went through all of the remaining response cards from our Christmas musical performances for this weekend. Based on the comments, those who attended were really blessed and want to see more of the same next year. The comments from last year's "Jingle in The City" were very similar, so I am not sure why we had such small crowds this year. The weather could have had an impact, but we also had a very slow start on ticket requests this year. Typically all of our tickets are gone by mid-November, but this year we still had some tickets remaining even on opening night. Advertising could have played a role in lower numbers. Last year our advertising team did a wonderful job of helping us get the information out to the public. This year, I was the advertising team. We followed many of the same plans that were used last year, but we just did not see a good return on our investment. I am not sure that print ads are worth the cost anymore. Very few people read news...

I must admit that I was disappointed in the attendance at our Saturday performances. We had more than 750 tickets requested and had a total of about 350 people attend. I reminded myself that we have had less in worship attendance at our early morning worship services, but it is still disappointing to have about 100 church members participating in a program for such small crowds. Then I took home the response cards from our Saturday performances and God had to teach me to stop looking at attendance numbers and realize that results are the real deciding factor of how successful we were in sharing His message. Of those who were willing to complete a response card on Saturday, we had: 5 people accept Christ; 14 people rededicate their lives to Christ; and 9 people attend who do not belong to any church. God does not need large crowds to change lives. And reports of how the program has left a lasting impression on people continue to be shared. One young man came to a performance ...

I am always excited to see how God is going to use our Christmas Spectacular programs. I must admit that I went into this year's programs with more fear and trembling than usual. Not because I doubt what God can do, not because I doubt the talents of our church family, but because I wrote the drama for this musical and was worried that what sounded like a great concept in my head would not be received all that well by others in our community. The musical started out as an idea after a small group from our church participated in a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City in November 2011. The entire box office for the concert went to help several churches that work with underprivileged teens and kids in the Brooklyn and Manhattan area. I started wondering about the big issues that these churches must deal with on a regular basis: teens in gangs, teens using drugs, unwed pregnant teens, teens from broken families, teens who steal because they have nothing and nothing ...

I was recently in a group setting where we were asked about Thanksgiving traditions with our families. I realized that I was the only one in the group who did not grow up with lots of family joining us for Thanksgiving or Christmas. We never lived close to other family members, so we typically had just our immediate family at home for the holidays. And some of those were without my dad while he was deployed during war time. I can still remember sitting around a reel-to-reel player listening to a tape my dad made while onboard his ship as he wished us all a Merry Christmas. I don't remember if he was home for Christmas, but I can remember that tape as well as the hours of Christmas music that he had taped from the Armed Forces Radio Network that was piped throughout his ship. Even though it was typically just my parents, my sister, and my brother, we usually sat down at a table with more food than we could eat in a week. My dad would always have something to say or some s...

God is love. That is true. The Bible tells us that in many different passages, but none as clearly as 1 John 4:8 & 16. But that is only one characteristic of God, even though it is the one characteristic that is often used to excuse sinful lives by a selfish world. Most people describe God as a loving God. Until something happens that they don't understand, then God becomes the punching bag of society. I believe that Christians have not been as successful or as burdened with witnessing because we have focused so much on God's love. Many people do not feel the urgency to accept Christ as their Savior because they cannot imagine a loving God condemning people to an eternity in Hell. And others reject God because they cannot believe in a loving God who will allow pain and suffering. The church's focus on a loving God has enabled the world to see a perverted religion. A religion that has been minimized to a jolly, smiling, good-natured God who stands above, but does...

The danger inherent in intellectualism is the misplaced notion that intellect is gained strictly from the learned studies of the sciences and humanities without any necessity of faith. To justify this inane belief one would need to ignore the gapping holes in scientific research and embrace the unwritten need to deify scientific thought as the end all to any argument. Scientific research has left the realm of true science and has been catapulted into a religion all its own. Scientists who dare to question the authority of the Holy Script are attacked and vilified as heretics of the faith. And, just as cults loosely based on truth remove or add to the written Word, when actions do not correlate to the Holy Script of Science, scientists see no moral issue with falsifying their findings. Or, to offer the benefit of the doubt toward their noble cause, perhaps I should rephrase that to adjusting the results based on their own preconceived expectations. Science is supposed to be a...

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30, NIV) If you had a decent education in America, you should have learned that the educational model of the Western world was based largely on the Ancient Greece educational system of providing intellectual studies, artistic endeavors, and physical activity for all students. Much of our understanding of the educational structure of the ancient Greeks comes from the writings of Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC).  Aristotle was the finale among a dynasty of education: Socrates taught Plato who in turn taught Aristotle. Aristotle then taught one history’s most successful commanders, the undefeated empire builder, Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s writings cover a multitude of subjects: physics, metaphysics, poetry, music, theater, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, ethics, and biology. From these writings, and the importance of the theater and the ...

The past few years have been extremely difficult for my family, specifically with financial and health issues. Some of these issues are behind us and some continue to linger on. It has been and remains a long, hard road, and we cannot always see why God has led us down this winding path overgrown with weeds and thorns that hide the many rocks and potholes. I know that there are some people who think that Christians, especially pastors, should not share so much online because it appears to be self serving, bragging, seeking sympathy, or used as a means to promote yourself. Others belittle any problems that you have by telling you that things could be worse, as if to say that you should keep your problems to yourself. These people apparently believe that Christians should be more like the family in this video: Too many Christians feel the need to hide the reality of their lives. But God has a different perspective about this: His Word teaches us that we are to laugh and cry...

He got up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Silence! Be still!” The wind ceased and there was a great calm. (Mark 4:39, HCSB) In the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, the character Nettie Fowler sings the words with which Jerry Lewis would later end every one of his Muscular Dystrophy Association telethons from 1964-2010: When you walk through a storm Keep your chin up high And don’t be afraid of the dark. At the end of the storm Is a golden sky And the sweet silver song of a lark. Walk on through the wind, Walk on through the rain, Tho’ your drams be tossed and blown. Walk on, walk on, With hope in your heart And you’ll never walk alone. This song was also made famous due to hit versions recorded by Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, Andy Williams, and Doris Day. Even Pink Floyd interpolated this song into their own song “Fearless” in 1971 and Barbara Streisand chose this song to end the 2001 Emmy Awards in honor of the vic...