Posted on

God’s Own Fool

Today I found a piece of paper tucked away with the lyrics to Michael Card’s wonderful song about how the world sees Jesus, as some crazy fool. If you can find a recording of this, it’s worth listening to. The opening phrase says it all for me. Growing up in the church it never occurred to me that the world finds him offensive. And why not? His perfectness shines light in the darkness of our lives and shows us just how evil our hearts can be. But, isn’t that the incredible paradox of the cross? What to the world was loss, was God’s victory!

Powerful words!

verse one
It seems I’ve imagined Him all of my life
As the wisest of all mankind
But if God’s holy wisdom is foolish to men
He must have seemed out of His mind
For even His family said He was mad
And the priests said a demon’s to blame
But God in the form of this angry young man
Could not have seemed perfectly sane

Chorus
When we in our foolishness thought we were wise
He played the fool and He opened our eyes
When we in our weakness thought we were strong
He became helpless to show we were wrong
And so we follow God’s own fool
For only the foolish can tell
Believe the unbelievable
Come be a fool as well

verse two
So come lose your life for a carpenter’s son
For a madman who died for a dream
And you’ll have the faith His first followers had
And you’ll feel the weight of the beam
So surrender the hunger to say you must know
Have the courage to say “I believe”
For the power of paradox opens your eyes
And blinds those who say they can see



If you’ve never heard this before, watch this video on YouTube. Come be a fool as well!

Posted on

Beauty Will Rise – Steven Curtis Chapman

Album available November 3, 2009.

Pre-buy it here from Family Christian Stores.

SCC has been my favorite CCM musician over the last 17 years or so. In 1990 as a new artist that I had barely heard of, he came and did a concert at our high school, South Kitsap. Unfortunately the concert was cut short due to the fact that he was losing his voice. But, he stood on stage and did was I’ve seen him do so many time in later years and just spoke about his family, what he was going through and just life in general. He always seemed less of a performer and more of a “real” person.

In 1993 he did a live concert in Seattle and several of us went to the concert. We even saw a shot of ourselves as the camera panned the audience. Lots of fun being able to say, “I remember that shot!” In later years he did a mini-concert at Key Arena during a couples retreat.

I always love good music, but I especially like strong lyrical content and the benchmark for me has always been Keith Green, whose energy in his music is hard to surpass. Chapman, like many other artists took up that challenge to make his music meaningful. He always allowed much of his music to be influenced by his daily life. These songs have really touched me through the years.

Whether it is love songs like “I Will Be Here”, “Go There With You” or “11-6-64” that every time I hear them I think of my beautiful wife. There are the songs with powerful meaning of God’s promises like “Bring It On”, “All Things New”, “God Is God” and “This Day”. Or incredible worship songs that seem to come from Steven’s soul like “Moment Made for Worshiping”, “Not Home Yet” and “Yours”. Then there are the songs that tap into the deep pain that life seems to throw at us and which have made the tough times that the Chapman family has gone through recently more real, like “With Hope”, “When Love Takes You In”, “Still Called Today” and “His Strength is perfect”.

I am really looking forward to this new album from Steven. There is no one that touches the truth of the matter quite like SCC.

Steven’s website, http://www.stevencurtischapman.com/

Steven’s blog, http://chapmanchannel.typepad.com/

 

Posted on

On Writing

Last weekend because of my daughter’s interesting in writing, we went to a book signing event at the Seattle Public Library for Kate DiCamillo author of “The Tale of Despeareaux” and “Because of Winn Dixie”. She gave a quote from another author that stated “I hate to write, but love to have written”.

My entire young life I loved to write. I imagined great epic tales and wrote down as many as I could. One of my crowning moments was one of my HS English vocabulary classes where we were to write a story each week using the words we were studying. Most of my peers wrote 1-2 pages a week. I wrote between 10 and 15 each week. My teacher described it as my “novel”.

I went to college and originally planned to go into architecture. However, after taking several writing classes, I rediscovered my love of writing and decided to major in English. I remember writing a short sketch about a battlefield and impressing my award winning Professor.

After finally graduating many people would ask me what I was going to do with an English degree. I explained that I wanted to write. However, because of a lack of discipline and just generally being distracted with life and work, I really didn’t write much after leaving school, even though I tried from time to time.

I got married and started working in the high tech industry, first at Microsoft. Although I had the opportunity to write documentation and do some editing for the magazine website that I worked on, I still didn’t write much. One day, however, my PhD college roommate called me and wanted me to write a manual for a piece of software that he had written. This was exciting and earned me a few dollars. Later I made contact with a small newsletter that was published by the Washington Software Association and had the opportunity to write several articles for their Newsbytes newsletter.

But, life in the high tech industry gets incredibly busy (example — when we were moving our data center in Sunnyvale, CA, I worked four days straight and only got 12 hours of sleep total – half of that before the project started). So, I haven’t been able to write as much as I want. I guess that a little bit of disciple, by forcing myself to write every day is really what I need to do.

This is the reason that I decided to start this blog (which is about whatever I think about) and my technology blog (http://configt.blogspot.com) are all about. I read a lot, mostly about technology, but also about a handful of other topics (politics, business, sports and history) and often have a lot of these things running around inside my head. My goal for this blog is to get those ideas out – train myself to find my voice in my writings and discipline myself in putting my thoughts down on paper.

I hope this becomes a launching pad for more great things to come.