Back in D-town

Update on what's happenin:

* I'm back in Dallas, and getting ready for my first weekend leading worship that is NOT an audition. Looking forward to getting back in that groove.
* I've been reorganizing all my praise stuff. After a few years of doing this praise thang, I feel like I have the organization process down pat. Once I get all the songs put into powerpoint format (should take me three-four days), I'll begin the process of going through the songs and powerpoints, checking for glaring errors, and begin numbering the songs so as to make the slides easily retrievable. This allows for an incredible amount of flexibility.
* Saw the movie Once with Jaimie last night. I loved it. But I love the Frames. Like, A LOT. So, a movie that had Glen Hansard (the lead singer) in a role in which he sang about 50% of the movie was a pretty good setup for me. The movie delivered. It was short and sweet, cute and not too sappy, and the music was gorgeous and Irish.

Random thoughts on my PVM:

I talked about the divergence of the 'church front' and the real life experience a little bit last week. I've read over it and want to talk a little more about this. I feel like there are many ways that we do this, and most of them are extremely subtle. We say things like, "I'll pray for you" and don't actually pray; we say we want to seek G-d wholeheartedly but still choose selfish things, and then we justify these choices without facing our self-servedness. I am not condemning these actions; they are very human actions. However, when we in the church begin to gloss over these things and pretend like they aren't happening, it's the first divergence. It grows further when people stop being accountable for larger decisions, like how we spend our money or how we treat our family. This is a common trend among Christians. Seems like Paul might have been addressing these issues in the very beginning of the whole Church thing.

We constantly swing to and fro regarding these things, but when you are in leadership, the split seems to grow larger and more blatant. Due to the holiness we ascribe to church leaders (or perhaps the holiness they ascribe to themselves), there is extra demand for perfection, perseverance and G-dliness. This demand, unfortunately, does not often lead to increased levels of these characteristics; instead, it seems to cause them to find new and creative ways to hide their own sinful natures, or perhaps new ways to point away from their own flaws by focusing on the flaws of others.

Maybe a better solution would be to begin each relationship with two things in mind: our own broken soul with all of its needs, weaknesses and failures AND the cross of Christ that both offers us any hope of justice and shows us how G-d wants us to make our choices. We put others first, always, everywhere in every situation. We trust that although we don't know the answers, we have hope in this G-d who died. And hopefully, we learn to be honest and open always, not hiding behind our sunday school answers and shiny fake smiles...