chapel songs.

I wish I could say that every Sunday I spend in church is a rich, overflowing time for my spirit.  That the songs we sing permeate my frustrations and that the sermon pierces right through all of my preconceptions and my judgments and that I walk out of the middle school where we meet totally upheaved and re-written.

This is not the case.  Due to my utter humanness I often find that I sort of grovel through the service hoping to pick up nuggets, grabbing them and shoving them into my pocket like a beggar on the streets of Boston.  I leave the service in a wrestling match between what I am and what I want to be.  My feet are in my sneakers and eternity is in my heart.  So for now, I try and I wait.

After our pastor gives the sermon on Sunday morning, the music team piles back up on stage to play another set of songs.  They kind of scurry up there like mice while he prays, asking the LORD to please sow the seeds of the Word in our hearts and I, in my own little lap, beg for it.   Sometimes my first reaction is to be irritated by that song that I don't feel like singing, but I am learning, have patience with me, that it isn't really about what I like or don't like. It's about singing songs that will take to the skies all the way up to heaven.  So this week when I was singing the songs I closed my eyes and imagined what it must be like for God to hear a whole church sing a song to him, about him.

We sang Be Thou My Vision, a hymn that I have sung so many, so many times.  I love this hymn.  The words are like a blazing fire that emits such a force of heat that you can feel it all around and inside you.  And do you know how a fire, all of its smells and glorious popping light, is somehow comforting in its grandeur?  This is the way that this hymn, with its music and its words, is to me.  And, like a fire, it has the capacity to make me feel so incredibly tiny and powerless.  

Our church is what people today would call "Contemporary," meaning that the music is more up-beat than many churches.  They add some spunk to this particular hymn but on Sunday, around the fourth verse, all of the instruments deadened except for the drum, played by this total rocker college kid.  The auditorium filled with the voices of the congregation and this tremendous Celtic drum beat.  The sound was audacious and, at last, I could imagine God really listening to our singing that colossal anthem.

Riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise.

Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:

Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,

Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.