I’ve been trying to establish a consistent quiet time in my life this year. I did pretty good the first 19 days of the year, then I stopped for the next 21 days. I’m now roughly back in a patter with 2 out of the last 3 days.

Some days I seem to really get hit by something I’m reading and other days I feel like I’ve simply checked off the box next to that day on the reading plan I’m using. Tonight was one of the heavy hitting nights.

Generally during my quiet time I have iTunes shuffling through my Gospel & Religious genre. Music helps me focus and I love when the song that’s playing lines up with something I’m reading in my quiet time. My friend describe it as:  “it’s almost like God’s reading along with you” and is picking the soundtrack to His story.

Tonight I read Genesis 42:18-45:28, Matthew 13:47-14:36, Psalm 18:16-40, and Proverbs 4:7-13. Here’s what I wrote in my journal after I finished reading those passaged:

It’s amazing the people God exalts in scripture. Joseph was the second youngest son of Israel. He was sold into slavery and exalted to second in command of all of Egypt.

David was a boy when God exalted him before the Israelites and he eventually became King and “a man after God’s heart”.

And 12 random men from various backgrounds, as well as other prophets like John the Baptist.

If these people can become exalted for God and glorify Him out of humble beginnings, why am I not living that way?

Somewhere in the middle of reading all of that, “The Shadow Proves the Sunshine” by Switchfoot came up in iTunes. There is a line in the song that goes

O, Lord, why did you forsake me?
O, Lord, don’t be far away
Storm clouds gathering beside me
Please Lord, don’t look the other way

I can’t help but think that must have been what Joseph was thinking after his brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt. And that David must have been thinking

Too scared that I’ll run away
Hold fast till the brink of daylight where,
The shadow proves the sunshine,
The shadow proves the sunshine

on the night before he was to face Goliath in battle. Or that the disciples had that thought more than once when they were with Jesus. And the hook of the song

the shadow proves the sunshine

defined the life of many of these people. The Matthew passage includes the execution of John the Baptist. His life was punctuated by a pointless execution, but the “shadow proved the sunshine” of the love of God. The earthly life of Christ was ended under the darkest of shadows only to prove the sunshine three days later.

But what’s the point of all this? What do a shadow and sunshine have to do with any of this? If you study the lives of everyone in these passages (and of Solomon, the primary author of Proverbs), each of their lives were decidedly marked by dark periods. But they used the darkest days of their lives to prove the glory of God. The Shekhinah (the dwelling place of God’s glory) was in the stories and lives of these people.

And they all came from humble beginnings and were eventually lifted to places of honor in their societies by the grace and deliverance of God. They trusted him through the good days and the bad days (the shadows) and through that His love and mercy (the sunshine) was proven.

After I finished reading these stories I realized that I don’t live like that. I don’t live a life where the good days and the bad days are used to exalt God in my life. I don’t trust God the way I should in all things. I haven’t embraced the wisdom that the Proverbs teach about in order to achieve righteousness. I don’t trust, or more accurately expect God to deliver me to greatness. I trust myself to get me to OK-ness. God hasn’t called me to live an OK life. He has called me–and wants to give me–a life of greatness. A life glorifying Him and satisfying to me.

God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

- John Piper -

The call to Christian living isn’t to live an OK life. There is nothing satisfying or glorified about an OK life. We are called to live lives of excellence and satisfaction and glorification of Him.

Genesis 1:16 “…and he made the stars also.”

Think about it. When we see images like the one above of the Crab Nebula, we’re blown away that something made of gas can look like that. But the way it’s written in the modern English Bible, stars almost seem like an afterthought for God. Not an “oh, yeah, I forgot about these” kind of afterthought, but an “I know they’ll get a kick out of looking at these” kind of thought. It blows my mind to think about how far away stars really are and how I love driving through dark areas where I can see a lot of stars. I can’t comprehend that what I see as little twinkling specs in the sky are actually things like this image.

When God created man, it took a lot more than a short phrase. We were created in HIS image. We were created to be so much more than something to look at. The complexity of a human being is far superior to stars. And yet we don’t always think or act that way. God made the stars for us to enjoy. God made us to enjoy Him.

Will you be just a star this year or something so much greater than a star? A child of God living to bring glory to Him so that we may enjoy Him more than we can imagine.

Do churches try to “think outside the box” because they are dissatisfied with the box God gave them?

This thought was sparked during a conversation with Stephen Proctor (@worshipVJ, WorshipVJ blog) over dinner. We got around to this question after talking about using technology in church, what does “excellence” mean, and a variety of other topics. Before I put this question in context, here are the Twitter replies that were sparked by my question:

(via @glohiatt) do you think God put us in a box?

(via @brianfalexander) @glohiatt what I think @chrisrouse is referring to is the life that God has given them, not sure though. God does give us restrictions..

(via @glohiatt) well if we are in a box, then so is the whole world. we were sent out to all corners of the earth, right?

Here is the context: a couple of months ago Church Production Magazine published an article on Elevation Church in Charlotte, NC. In the article, Wes Watson, Elevation’s lead producer, is quoted as saying:

“Pastor [Furtick] leads us to think inside the box vs. outside the box. We’ve learned that as we think inside the box, it forces the box to get bigger. Let’s be honest, the box is there (nothing is free), so quit thinking outside the box and get creative on what the inside of your box looks like.

So now you have the context of my tweet. It has nothing to do with the life we as Christians live or anything like that. It has to do with how the church responds creatively to technology and physical things. Sure, there may be a church down the street that is bigger and has fancy lights and concert-quality production, and your church may have some conventional light fixtures and a single projector.

We’re trained out whole lives to “think outside the box”. To do something no one else has thought of. In marketing, it’s referred to as “guerrilla marketing.” In the church, thinking outside the box tends to mean doing something that your individual church hasn’t done, but that has been done by other churches. Many churches defer to Willow Creek, North Point, LifeChurch.tv, Saddleback, etc for their ideas.

(I’m struggling to keep this topic focused already. I want to go some many directions with it, but I don’t have time.)

When we think inside the box, inside the restrictive budgets we’ve been given, inside the style of worship our church has, inside the spiritual and emotional space our church members are living in, we learn to do more with less. And as we learn to do more with less, we realize how to expand what we can do.

Think about it, Jesus fed a lot of people on some fish and bread. Small box, big results. Granted, He did have a bit of a bonus on His side being God and all, but still, the lesson exhibited in that story is to trust God to do more with what we have. He didn’t have any doubt that the small ration he had would go a long way. He knew it would.

The same goes for the church. Proctor expanded on my initial thought by asking if the reason we try to think outside the box so often is because we are dissatisfied with the box God has given us to work in. But I think if we constantly strive to think outside the box, we’ll never get there. We’ll always want bigger and better and shinier. If we think INSIDE the box, we find creative ways to use our limited resources to create environments and experiences far greater than we imagined. If we simply trust God to do more with what He has given us, our box will grow. If we try to force the box to grow by thinking outside of it all the time, the box will eventually catch up to our great ideas and suddenly be inside the box again.

Don’t be so concerned about being better than “that” church. Focus on being the best church for your members and guests. Church is not a competition. We’re all in this together. God never called us to do more than we can. He called us to do more with what He has given us. And what He has given us fits into a pretty spectacular box.

The box is a test of faith. Trust God inside the box and He’ll provide you with the resources to have a bigger box when you need it. Just don’t put God in the box.

Since my first tweet, I’ve covered a mission trip, birthday wishes, musical selections, food options, random updates, replies to people, re-tweets of others, made general observations, promoted things, attacked things, and recently started looking for a job.

The beauty of Twitter is that it allows networking to happen with virtually no effort on ones part. I attended a conference a couple weeks ago for church tech people and I met a couple dozen new people and added many of them as followers/people I follow on Twitter. Since then I have had a national network of people keeping their ears and eyes open helping me job hunt.

While at the conference I got to meet someone that I connected with during the summer over wireless RF issues while in San Diego (@rfninja). He works for Shure Microphones. He also recommended me for a job opening at a pretty well known company in the church production world. As I write this, I’m currently “It” in a game of phone tag with the president of that company.

Twitter also helped me get some temporary work at a local church here in Nashville so that I can make a little extra money and help them out where I can.

Tonight I opened up TweetDeck and I had an @reply from someone that is connected to me on Twitter via a few other connections with a job offer for a part-time sound tech position at his church.

Before I give too much credit to Twitter, I haven’t officially gotten a “real” job out of any of this yet, just a couple of offers. However, I haven’t received any offers via Facebook or LinkedIn, nor are either of those are easy to network on.

I prefer to network via Twitter because it allows for rapid communication with people and instant connections and there is minimal personal information involved. Granted, anyone following me, or who looks me up on Twitter, can see my 2000+ posts, they are only able to see one side of the conversation (unless they follow the people I follow or do a general search for my name) which allows for some privacy in a very public forum.

I’ve also made a few real-life connections with people I’ve met via Twitter, and there are still several more that I look forward to getting to meet one day.

All in all, for as narcissistic as Twitter can be, it can be an incredibly practical networking tool. Here’s hoping to landing a job via @twitter connections.

—-

Update:  Since posting this, I have started working at a church in Nashville, Long Hollow Baptist Church, part time. While I didn’t get this job directly thanks to being on Twitter and talking about needing a job, it didn’t hurt.  I was able to stay connected to a guy I knew there and talked about a possible future job opening there. Then I connected with the FOH guy via email, then Facebook, then Twitter, and filled in a couple of times mixing monitors at the main campus and FOH at one of the satellite campuses. And after a few dozen tweets about looking for work, I finally got offered a part-time job at the church.

but this morning during church it hit me that visual silence doesn’t have to be led by the lead video/graphics person. visual silence can be practiced individually. if you’re having trouble focusing on the meaning of the song because the graphic is distracting or somehow blocking your ability to connect on a deeper level, it’s easy to close your eyes and just listen.

people often close their eyes during worship as a way to focus their thoughts and attention on the meaning of the song and on God. i spent more time during the worship set at church today with my eyes closed than i did with them open. for the one song that i didn’t know i sang through part of the song, but the words were so powerful and moving that i couldn’t keep singing and just closed my eyes and redirected my focus.

then it hit me that i was practicing visual silence as an individual. i was silencing all the visuals–what was on screen, the band, the people around me–in my mind and opening my heart and my ears to the words that were being sung.

maybe in the midst of all this growing discussion about visual worship and visual silence, we need to be helping people practice visual silence on their own when they feel the need. it’s possible that many people may not even realize that they are being so distracted during worship by what’s going on that if they just practiced visual silence on their own that they’re worship may be more powerful than they’ve ever experienced.

sometimes it’s good to remove the graphics from the screen and to drop out to simple lighting, but when we can still see what’s going on around us, visual silence is only being partially achieved.

close your eyes. sing along if you know the words, or simply sit back and listen to the words. don’t be afraid to practice visual silence on your own no matter what’s going on on screen.