Postmodernism’s colour, wood and bone are a response to modernism’s gray, plastic and metal.
Cultural response is the only way society heals itself from its previous wounds.
On this New Year’s eve day, I’d like to revisit a story I wrote years ago that resonates with my life targets again for this coming 365 days. I hope you enjoy it.
ENJOY YOUR LIFE
Dan Wilt
“The malice of sloth lies not merely in the neglect of duty (though that can be a symptom of it) but in the refusal of joy. It is allied to despair.”
Evelyn Waugh, from The Seven Deadly Sins
Pap, as we called him, was a soldier in World War II. As his grandson, most of my knowledge of his prime years came to me in the form of stories and banter shared between family members at reunions. Pap never seemed to feel it was necessary to tell me much about his life, so I never pried.
I’m told he was an important employee at our local military base, worked in a supply depot during the Great War, and never saw the front end of combat. I’m glad. I have some photos of him that he sent to my grandmother during the war, both shots taken while he poised himself on supply barrels. In one picture he is standing, and in another, sitting.
On the back of one image, the sitting one, Pap wrote a brief love note to my grandmother. I cried the first time I read it. He calls her his “star,” references the old tune “That’ll Be the Day,” and talks about reaching out to the sky to hold his celestial beauty in his arms again. Unlike so many of his war-time compatriots, he did hold his shimmering night jewel once again.
I used to sit with my grandfather on his front porch as he neared the end of his life on earth. Chained to an oxygen tank and a failing heart, he had burdens to carry my adolescent mind couldn’t appreciate. He occasionally held a cup of ice chips close – the only water allowed to touch his lips.
He had come to faith in Jesus later in his life, and he and I would spend long hours talking about the energies of prayer, the strangeness of church, the importance of oxygen and water (both of which were precious luxuries to him), our quirky small town and the mysterious topic of women. I’m glad we got in that last part.
I was with my grandfather on the morning he died. I sat by his bedside, holding his hand. He was trapped in a failing bio-system, crying out in a loud delirium to old army buddies, and more vigorously, to his mother. I cried at his bedside, unable to help him, unable to pray, and unable to emotionally grasp this transformation of a man of profound wisdom back into the semblance of a scared child.
To watch him be a man, and a child at the same time, caused a strange dissonance in my young heart. Then, he startled me. With a firm grip on my hand and a jerk of my body toward his, Pap stared right through me – he had something important to say.
Eyes locked, his as wide as silver dollars and my own full of tears, Pap was as silent and sane as I had ever seen him. With a stare that held me tighter than a vise, he spoke firmly and with military command on his lips:
“Daniel, enjoy your life.
Jesus will take care of you.
I love you, I love you, I love you….”
His eyes fell to half-mast, and his gaze slowly wandered from me. He was still alive, but seemed to have sunk into a solitude having said his peace. My grandfather’s one moment of sanity in the middle of his last moments, and he decided to spend it leaving me a legacy. I just wept at his bedside.
A short time later, Pap died in the ambulance outside of his home on Vine Street. I thought the legacy had been passed on in completeness. I was changed forever. But God felt one more stroke of the pen was in order.
A friend, working on the ambulance crew of our small town, called me a few days after my grandfather’s death. It seems he was on day shift the morning Pap died. With trembling in his voice, he told me that within minutes of driving off with my grandfather in the ambulance, Pap opened his eyes wide, smiled, and lifted his hands to heaven. “I see you Jesus, I’m coming!” were the words filled the ambulance.
With that declaration, he passed from this life to the next. His legacy concluded in a worshiping prayer, a prayer of return home. One last, human phrase to be breathed, and his greatest gift to God fully offered.
I pray differently now. I pray that life would not be a burden for my wife and children, or for the people on my prayer list. I ask of God that joy would follow their steps. I ask Him that life would pivot from being a “have-to” to being a “get-to” – a life lived out in consecration, and not simply in obligation.
If I’m going to look for joy, listen for joy, live in joy and bring joy to the world, I’ll have to infuse my own life with a joyful approach to all things that I do. In Pap’s words, I will enjoy my life, help others to enjoy their own, and help us all to enjoy one another’s lives.
I now approach my prayerful days expecting to enjoy my life, instead of relinquishing my attitude to the endless duties and responsibilities that may mark the hours.
“Give your servant a happy life, I put myself in your hands!”
From Psalm 85 in The Message
A number of reviews/endorsements from our participants in our Institute Two Week Intensive Certificate Program in Worship Studies & Spiritual Formation are now posted on the site.
With great photos from good friend and designer Matt Frise, you can see some of the glorious faces that make the work we do so very worthwhile. Make sure you check out Kim Gentes’ (WorshipMusic.com, WorshipTeam.com) great synopsis of the time at the end.
Check ‘em out:
Intensive Participant Reviews.
Friends, on this day before New Year’s Eve, I just want to wish you a wonderful turn into the New Year.
Also, I want to let you know that I’ll be approving comments on the blog in order to cut down on the spam getting through the cracks into the comments.
I.e. There will be a bit of a delay each time you comment till I approve it. Thanks for your patience as I try this out for awhile.
Blessings; rise high for us all in 2007.
Kathryn Scott from Northern Ireland joined our class a few weeks ago (from her home across the pond) to interact for an hour with students in our Leadership In Contemporary Worship class. Here’s the SSU news item on it:
Kathryn Scott With Institute Class
This in from good friend, Heidi Turner, on personal book publishing.
In some cases, not needing a publisher to say “Your content is worthy of publishing” is a good idea for the heart becoming fully alive.
Appreciating the music of Andy Mckee, in the tradition of great guitar players.
Merry Christmas from our family to yours.
Dan, Anita, Anna, Abbi, and Ben
I was carrying on a brief exchange with dear friend and fellow worship leader Craig Douglas, and was reminded just how much energy and effort worship leaders are putting into Christmas eve morning services, Christmas eve services, Christmas Day services, New Year’s Eve day services, etc. over this final week of 2006.
Often, while others are resting, visiting or bustling to prepare to attend services that revisit and reclaim the beautiful reality of the Incarnation, worship leaders, musicians and tech people are showing up early to move gear, set up, prepare sets, rehearse, refine sound, and create a space where meaningful engagement with God and the Story can occur.
As a fellow worship leader, I just want to say “Bless you and your family” as you faithfully perform this service to the beautiful, stunning Body of Christ; thank you for enriching us all with your labor of love. May you find the worth in every moment of your preparation for those times of worship. May you find your own heart stirred in the midst of the activity. May you find the sacred space to deeply enjoy the loved ones with whom God has surrounded you, and embrace the implications of such a wild belief that we hold – that God moved toward us, rather than demanding that we first move toward Him.
And… enjoy the music, the art and the wonder of it all.
As we near the raw, imperfect perfection of the Christmas story reclaimed once again, I’m drawn to some ideas that I’ll be sharing in our community tomorrow on Christmas Eve morning. I’ll try to post the whole devotional (it will be short; the kids have the run of the morning!) tomorrow, but for now, I’m reminded of this post and its exquisite idea, the anthropic principle, and how it seems to lace everything that God does with us here on earth.
SCIENTIST WINS TOP PRIZE (Globe and Mail)
John Barrow, a cosmologist and mathematician at Cambridge University in Britain who believes that science reveals the reality of God as the sole Author of Creation, is this year’s winner of the prestigious Templeton Prize, according to the Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada Newspaper).
The award – this year worth $1.6 million dollars – is presented annually to scholars whose research or discoveries advance the human understanding of spiritual realities.
Barrow is a leading proponent of the anthropic cosmological principle. This is essentially the belief that the universe is the way it is because it was God’s plan that there be life on Earth – and that this would not have been possible if the universe had been fashioned in any other way.
Barrow is director of Cambridge’s Millennium Mathematics Project and professor of astronomy at London’s Gresham College. The author of 17 books, his most recent book is The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless. The Ottawa Citizen called it “an elegant discussion of our concept of infinity throughout history: as an expression of God, as an expression of mathematics, or as an idea about the unimaginable vastness of the universe.”
Barrow credits recent discoveries in astronomy with “[transforming] the simple-minded, life-averse, meaningless universe of the skeptical philosophers,” he told the Globe and Mail.
“It breathes new life into so many religious questions of ultimate concern and never-ending fascination. Many of the deepest and most engaging questions that we grapple with still about the nature of the universe have their origins in our purely religious quest for meaning.
“We see now how it is possible for a universe that displays unending complexity and exquisite structure to be governed by a few simple laws that are symmetrical and intelligible, laws which govern the most remarkable things in our universe – populations of elementary ‘particles’ that are everywhere perfectly identical.”
My dear friend, fine artist Janie Reynolds (Whitelock), has just put up a new website featuring her work. Janie is an incredible talent, who was trained at the prestigious Royal College of Art and has since gone on to work for a wide range of well known clients such as Habitat, The National Trust, Good Housekeeping, Marks & Spencer – as well as illustrating a number of natural history books.
She is married to my other dear friend Chris Whitelock, who heads up Vineyard Records UK. They’ve been such a gift to me personally through the past number of years, along with their little guys Harry and Jack, and it’s my privilege to introduce you to some of Janie’s work. Janie is open to doing freelance illustration work these days, especially focused on nature and animals. Her portfolio is stunning.
Pay her a visit if you would, and leave a comment on her site.
So I’m talking to my mechanic the other day in his shop, and I look at a color printed picture posted on his wall.
Egad.
He and his son took out a moose this year with a horn rack that was 51″ across, 31″ tall, 14″ across each blade, and had 15 points.
That got me to thinking:
1. What kind of a moose grows that big eating just berries and plants?
2. Why don’t human beings grow horns?
and
3. If you meet a moose in the woods and it runs you over, and no one is there to see it happen, are you still flat?
P.S. He noted that the best part of the trip was the fun he and his son had together. Bonding over hunting. What a concept.
Here is a revised and update post on the Simple Carols video training clips, now on YouTube:
As per a request, to go along with the Simple Carols chord charts, simple video clips of me playing them according to those charts.
Here are all the Simple Carols clips at YouTube. Note: For some reason, the audio and video are a bit out of sync on these. Close your eyes and listen if’n it bugs you. Something in the upload, methinks.
Here are all the Simple Carols clips at the Institute site: Simple Carols Video Training Clips
Clips may take between 1 minute to 2.5 minutes to load in QuickTime (the multiple verses of the songs are long), so be patient once you select a carol. I’ll be working on this to make download times shorter. Promise – I’m trying to integrate YouTube.com with my iWeb site.
We do what we can here at the Institute….
Simple Carols Video Training Clips
Here’s a YouTube sample of the Angels We Have Heard On High clip. The rest are at the link above. Nothing amazing; just some quick snapshots of how the song could be simplified and done in a way that won’t physically or emotionally hurt a guitarist or band!
Solid idea Jason Clark and his community did for Christmas caring this year.