Sunday, January 24, 2010

Peculiar Pain

One day...
"I felt like," my husband began in a way which let me know he was reflecting on this morning's church service, "the words...to the worship songs were particularly meaningless today." Agreed! I could hardly bring myself to sing some of them, and at this point I told him so. It turned out that our silences during much of the singing was due to the same reason. We were experiencing the peculiar pain of human-focused worship songs. (Remove one nonessential word from that sentence and you get human-worship songs. Not good.) We just weren't "feeling it", and the songs we were expected to sing with proper enthusiasm and, perhaps, hand-raising, were so completely focused on our own feelings that I did not feel that I could honestly sing them, based on how I happened to be feeling today. Plus, if I voiced those flashing, non-punctuated PowerPoint phrases, I wouldn't be singing about God, I would be singing about me.

I'm a sinner saved by grace who still lives in a world chock-full of sin and the resulting pain and suffering; I'm being sanctified by Jesus, but on some days I'm still up to my eyeballs in sadness, depression, doubt, or just plain bad attitude. So it's not helpful to me to sing about myself, but more importantly it borders on the blasphemous to fill God's place in the song with me. Why should I sing about my emotions when I could be singing about God's attributes? Why sing about my response to Him when I can sing about what He's done for me? Even when the songs are written with the best of intentions (as I am sure many of them are) the lyricists seem to have chosen the second-best option--writing about the prodigal son returning when they could be writing about the Father standing with open arms to greet him.

No comments:

Post a Comment