One Way Out

My wife and I finished off our mini-vacation today by experiencing a little of the "Roots 'n Blues 'n BBQ" Festival in Columbia, Missouri. It was a beautiful day and a great crowd gathered for three stages of R & B music plus great food. As my wife, our son, and I wandered past one of the stages, a real good blues guitarist played something I recognized. It was his version of "One Way Out." It took me a moment to figure out what it was, but he was doing his rendition of this blues classic. (My favorite version is the live performance of "One Way Out" done by the Allman Brothers Band at the Fillmore concerts in 1971. Am I old, or what?!?) I'll bet that song's been done a thousand different ways by scores of different musicians.

I'm no music expert; I'm barely a music novice. I really like blues and jazz, though. I'm drawn to these styles by the fact that songs are never done exactly the same way from one artist to the next or even from one time to the next. You know full well you're listening to jazz or blues, and you recognize songs, but you delight in how the song changes from one performer to the next, one audience to the next, or one moment to the next.

I think there's health in that, and I think Jesus-followers can take a lesson from it. Sometimes we get fixed and stodgy about the form in which we deliver the good news of Jesus Christ. We decide that it has to be a certain way, or we have to repeat it exactly the same way, regardless of how audiences, circumstances, and times vary. Or we bend and reshape it so much to go with the current flow, that the core of it becomes unrecognizable. Jazz and blues do neither. "One Way Out" is always "One Way Out," but it's new and fresh every time.

Postings will be spotty again this week. My wife is having surgery on Monday. All should go well. Prayers will be appreciate. Keep on paddling, and I'll catch up soon.

Eternalizing

I've spent part of the week watching soccer matches. Last night's was particularly exciting, having gone into double overtime. The fans from both schools whipped themselves into a pretty intense frenzy. All of us, including me, acted for the moment as if life itself depended on the outcome. Afterwards I imagine most of us sat back and thought, "Well that was exciting. But it is a game, after all, and they are just kids."

It's pretty normal to get excited about events, people, and circumstances. Sometimes, however I think all of us can allow such things to have more weight than they actually do. Henri Nouwen, a great leader in Christian spiritual formation, regarded this as "eternalizing," especially when we allow people, events, and things to let us sink into negativity. Nouwen said, "Small, seemingly innocent events keep telling us how easily we eternalize ourselves and our world. It takes only a hostile word to make us feel sad and lonely. It takes only a rejecting gesture to plunge us into self-complaint. It takes only a substantial failure in our work to lead us into a self-destructive depression." (Henri Nouwen in Reaching Out.)

I'm afraid that when we eternalize people, events, and circumstances around us, we lose complete perspective. Our favorite team's performance makes our day or breaks it. As Jesus-followers our outlook rises or falls depending on whether or not we liked the music in worship, whether or not the message in worship moved us personally, or whether or not the right people said the right things to us. All of this bleeds energy of the things that really do matter eternally - Loving God and loving each other as Jesus has loved us.

Sometimes I think we just need some healthy distance from the world of immediacy around us. This doesn't mean detachment or apathy. This just involves a realization that eternalizing puts yet another barrier between us and God, and between us and the fulfillment of what God has called us to be and to do. Nouwen says, "This lack of distance, which excludes the humor in life, can create a suffocating depression which prevents us from living our heads above the horizon of our own limited existence."

I'll see you around the next bend in the river.