On the Twelfth Day of Christmas-Rich Mullins "You Gotta Get Up"

From now until Christmas day, I will be posting some sort of Christmas related post for the 12 Days of Christmas.  As a kid, I remember the anticipation of getting up in the morning to see what presents Santa brought for us.  It was always the case that us kids would wake up before our parents and we would eagerly encourage them to wake up.  I think Rich Mullins captures that feeling perfectly.  On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, You Gotta Get Up.  Merry Christmas everybody!

On the Third Day of Christmas-Ted Yoder "Little Drummer Boy"

From now until Christmas day, I will be posting some sort of Christmas related post for the 12 Days of Christmas.  On the Third Day of Christmas, I present Ted Yoder performing The Little Drummer Boy on the hammered dulcimer.  I fell in love with the sound of the hammered dulcimer from listening to the music of Rich Mullins who featured the instrument in many of his songs.

 

Music Monday-Mitch McVicker "Awaken Me to Love"

Ever since the election two weeks ago, I have been contemplating things on a more spiritual level. Rather than listening to conservative, political talk radio, I have been listening to Christian radio and some of my old Christian Contemporary Music CDs.

On the music front, I have been listening to a lot of Rich Mullins. Mitch McVicker is a Christian musician who happened to have been close friends with Rich. In fact, he was in the vehicle when the accident occurred that took Rich Mullins home. Here is one of his latest tunes.

Come join Music Monday and share your songs with us. Rules are simple. Leave ONLY the ACTUAL LINK POST here and grab the code below and place it at your blog entry. You can grab this code at LadyJava's Lounge Please note these links are STRICTLY for Music Monday participants only. All others will be deleted without prejudice.   PS: Because of spamming purposes, the linky will be closed on Thursday of each week at midnight, Malaysian Time. Thank you!

Music Monday-Phil Stacey "Hard to Get"

Just prior to his untimely death in an automobile accident, Rich Mullins had recorded some very rough demos that would later be released as a 2-CD set entitled The Jesus Record. One CD was the rough demos of Rich performing the songs. The second CD was several of Christian Contemporary Music's biggest starts performing the songs.

Even though I am not currently involved with a church, I still like to listen to Christian music and read Christian books. Whenever I feel like things are particularly closing in around me or I just feel small in the face of everything, there are two Rich Mullins songs that become a prayer for me.

The first one is Hold Me Jesus which I featured in the Music Monday post here. The second one is this song from The Jesus Record, performed by Phil Stacey.  The lyrics are unbelievably moving.

Come join Music Monday and share your songs with us. Rules are simple. Leave ONLY the ACTUAL LINK POST here and grab the code below and place it at your blog entry. You can grab this code at LadyJava's Lounge Please note these links are STRICTLY for Music Monday participants only. All others will be deleted without prejudice.   PS: Because of spamming purposes, the linky will be closed on Thursday of each week at midnight, Malaysian Time. Thank you!

Communion and Confirmation

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As I have mentioned on numerous occasions, my son attends and lives at a school on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  I believe I have mentioned this, but just in case I haven't, it is a Catholic school.  My religious background is Protestantism, primarily Baptist, and I have studied other religions such as Buddhism and a few other Christian denominations, including Catholicism.

My wife, on the other hand, was raised in the Roman Catholic Church.  Our first marriage occurred in the country clerk's office in Key West.  We then had a church wedding a few months later to make it official in the eyes of the church and her father.  During the early years of our married life, we did not attend church much.  However, when our son was born, we had him Christened in the Catholic Church.

From then on, we pretty much stopped attending church.  I had a few bad experiences with some of the Protestant churches that I had attended.  I do a lot of studying on my own, but quite frankly nothing on a consistent basis.  My wife eventually became totally disenchanted with the Catholic Church.  I think a lot of her disenchantment occurred during the time frame of all the reports of priests molesting young boys.  She eventually decided to seek a new church and decided on the Mormon faith.  She attended regularly for a while, but has not attended regularly for the past year or so.

Cover of Rich Mullins

The bulk of my son's religious instruction in his almost 18 years has been through children's religious music.  I also introduced him to the music of Rich Mullins.  We used to watch one of his concert videos together for hours on end.  I still remember my son reciting one of Mullins' monologues when Mullins talked about Jesus being a little boy and imagining him playing baseball.  "If Jesus was going to play baseball, just how many windows would he knock out around Nazareth, and who was going to make him pay?"

The reason that I bring all this up is that we had a meeting today at his school to discuss his IEP (Individualized Education Program).  When we got home from the meeting a couple hours ago, we had a letter from the school.  At first I thought it was going to be an incident report from the school that they talked about at the meeting where he ended up getting a bruise on his back from some behavioral incident.  Instead it was a letter from a woman at the school who prepares the kids for their First Communion and Confirmation sacraments.

I would like for my son to go through some sort of religious training.  Even though I do not agree with everything that the Catholic Church teaches, he is there and I think it would be important for him.  I do wonder if he would be able to understand what they are teaching him.  Another question that I would have is would he eat the Communion wafer, or would they have to douse it in BBQ sauce?  The biggest question would be whether or not my wife would want him to go through it given her disenchantment with the Church.    It could make for interesting dinner conversation this evening.

June Break is Over

Image via WikipediaI hope that everybody had a great 4th of July weekend.  All things considered it was a pretty good 4th for our family.  It was the last day of my son's slightly more than two week break between the end of the school year and the start of his summer session.  His next break will not be for another seven weeks when he will get another two week break.

What better way to spend the 4th of July with two quintessential American activities, a baseball game followed up with a fireworks show after the game.  It has become a family tradition of ours to go to the Bowie Baysox minor league park on July 4th.  The Baysox always have an excellent fireworks show, and it is even better on Independence Day.

Usually, this time of year, we run into the threat of severe thunderstorms or overly oppressive heat and humidity.  While it was a fairly warm day yesterday with a bit of humidity, there was enough cloud cover that it was not unbearably so.  In fact, it even got to be somewhat pleasant sitting in the stadium.  We did get a few sprinkles here and there, but no real rain.  We were pretty lucky, because I looked at the radar maps a couple times on my cell phone and it looked like rain was all around us.  There were some heavy storms about 30 miles south of where we were.

As I said, the Baysox always put on a great fireworks show.  Little did we realize that they would be providing a bunch of fireworks of a different kind during the game.  It may have been the highest scoring Baysox game that we have ever been to.  Fortunately, the home team ended up on the winning side of the scoreboard against the Reading Phillies.

At first, it didn't look like it was going to be a positive night for the Baysox.  They fell behind early in the game by the score 3-0.  The Baysox scored the next 5 runs to take a 5-3 lead.  The Phillies then scored 3 more runs in the top of the 6th inning to regain the lead 6-5.  The Baysox then score 7 runs in the bottom of the 6th and 5 more in the bottom of the 7th to take a 17-6 lead into the 9th inning.  The Phillies made it interesting scoring 6 runs in the 9th to get to the final score of 17-12.

The 4th of July game is one of the few games where the Baysox nearly completely fill the stadium.  There is only one road out of the stadium, so my normally 10 minute drive home from the stadium took considerably longer last night.  Combine that with the traffic leaving the community fireworks show a couple miles from the stadium led to gridlock.  The direction we had to travel was not as bad as the opposite route, but it still took me 30-40 minutes to get home.

After the game, I was working on burning a DVD of a Rich Mullins concert for my son to take with him to school.  I have bought three different copies of this particular video, but he has broken them in the past.  It usually takes me a couple hours to complete a DVD for him on my laptop.  Unfortunately, there was an error when it was burning, and I was unable to get the DVD burned for him before he left.  When he got up this morning, he was looking through his binder of CDs and DVDs and told me "Rich Mullins is missing."

I was a little disappointed that I was unable to get his DVD made for him before he left.  My wife had decided that she wanted to try to take him back to school by himself.  She has said, and probably rightfully so, that when I stay home from work on the days he goes back to school that he resists because he knows he is going back.  With his change of classrooms, I kind of wanted to go with them today, but it was probably best that I not be around to make it easier for her to get him back to school.  They made it back with no incidents.

On the 9th Day of Christmas-You Gotta Get Up

To celebrate the season of Christmas, I will be presenting 12 straight days of posts related to Christmas.  We will call it, for lack of a better term, "The 12 Days of Christmas."  Real original, I know.  Some of the posts will be serious, some will be fun, but all will deal with Christmas in some way, shape or form.

I remember when I was a kid and the anticipation of getting up to open presents on Christmas morning.  In my family, we had a rule, we couldn't open presents until everyone was up.  I had two brothers and a sister, and we were all up well before our parents.  Once everyone was up, we could open one present each before breakfast.  The rest would have to wait until after breakfast, and it was usually a big breakfast.  It was torture.

On the 9th Day of Christmas, I give to you Rich Mullins and "You Gotta Get Up."

On the 7th Day of Christmas-Silent Night

To celebrate the season of Christmas, I will be presenting 12 straight days of posts related to Christmas.  We will call it, for lack of a better term, "The 12 Days of Christmas."  Real original, I know.  Some of the posts will be serious, some will be fun, but all will deal with Christmas in some way, shape or form.

Without a doubt, my favorite Christmas song of all time is "Silent Night." There are two reasons that it is my favorite; first it is a beautiful song, and second is because it was originally written to be performed on guitar.

That is not to say that there are not other instruments that are as beautiful in the performance of the song.  I became a fan of the hammered dulcimer after listening to a lot of Rich Mullins music.  Also, my blogging buddy, Mike Golch, features the hammered dulcimer on his blog.

On the 7th Day of Christmas, and on this Music Monday, I present to you "Silent Night" performed on the hammered dulcimer.

Come join Music Monday and share your songs with us. Rules are simple. Leave ONLY the actual post link here and grab the code below and place it at your blog entry. You can grab this code at LadyJava's Lounge Please note these links are STRICTLY for Music Monday participants only. All others will be deleted without prejudice.

Hate in the Name of Jesus

I confess that I am not currently what you would consider a "religious" person, though at times in my past I have been.  I do still consider myself to be a Christian, but I have also read a bit of Buddhism.  Even though I no longer consider myself to be a religious person, I do have a great deal of respect for those who are dedicated to their faith.  It offends me to see the lack of respect for the Judeo-Christian foundations of this country, and what can be perceived as attacks against Christianity.

Likewise, I take offense at those that pervert the message of the Gospel of Christ.  Instead of a gospel of love, they preach a gospel of hate.  Now, I am not talking about those mainstream churches that preach out against sin.  As one pastor I was associated with used to say, "Love the sinner, hate the sin."  I do believe that you can be against certain acts that religious groups would consider sinful, and still be respectful and loving to those who engage in those acts. 

Instead, I am talking about people like the folks at Westboro Baptist Church who hold up signs saying "God Hates Fags" and protest outside of the funerals of our fallen soldiers.  I once heard the late Rich Mullins jokingly say in concert video made a few months before he passed away, "I know that vengeance is mine thus sayeth the Lord, but I just want to be about the Lord's business."  Unfortunately those of the WBC and their ilk, take that as more of a calling.

The reason I bring this up today, is that I was driving home from work this evening when I saw a truck similar to the one pictured here.  The only difference is that the one I saw had a picture of the twin towers from 9/11 instead of the two guys kissing.  My first reaction was that I wanted to drive up next to the guy and flip him the bird.  Not a very Christian impulse on my part, I admit.  Instead, I was fortunate to be in a fast moving lane and motored on ahead of the offending vehicle.

As I continued on my merry way thinking about the truck, I wondered to myself if it was the folks from WBC.  I don't think it was, but it is hateful nonetheless.  After a few minutes, the radio was reporting an overturned vehicle had just been reported around the area where I left the truck in my dust.  Immediately, I wondered if the truck was somehow involved in the accident, and thought, if so, they got what they deserved.  Again, not a very Christian thought on my part.  It turns out the accident was heading in the other direction.

In closing, I want to quote Rich Mullins once again from the same video, "This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers, but they're just wrong.  They're not bad, they're just wrong.  Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in your beautiful house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you.  Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved, and Jesus loved the poor, and Jesus loved the broken."  The whole monologue is below and is worth spending the 10 minutes to watch it.

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Music Monday-Rich Mullins

Image via Wikipedia

When I was in my 20's, I was very involved in the Christian faith, in particular Baptist churches. I did all of the things that good baptists were supposed to do; Sunday school & service on Sunday morning, Sunday evening service, and Wednesday prayer service. With one group of friends, I attended a weekend event called "Creation" which I affectionately refer to as "Woodstock for Christians."

I first became aware of Rich Mullins as a songwriter, not as an artist. The first song that I ever heard that was written by Rich was "Sing Your Praise to the Lord" when it was released by Amy Grant. Next, Michael W. Smith released his version of "Awesome God." I was in California on business, and feeling sorry for myself and in need of some comfort, so I went to a Christian bookstore and bought my first two Rich Mullins albums, "Songs" a greatest hits compilation, and " The Jesus Record."

I so not want to cast aspersions on the motives or spirituality of other artists in the Contemporary Christian Music genre. However, Rich Mullins was a unique individual. In his field, Rich Mullins was very successful, both as an artist and a songwriter. He could have led a comfortable, if not wealthy lifestyle. Instead, all of his royalties went to his church, and he had them pay him a salary equal to the salary of the average worker, the rest to charity. At the time of his death, he was living on a Navajo reservation teaching music to children.

The reasons that I am no longer active in the church are many. Some of them due to my own frailty as a human being. Some due to some bad experiences that I had within the church. At the time I left the church, I often felt that Jesus himself might not be comfortable in today's church, especially not in the big mega churches. Don't get me wrong, there are a great many sincere and caring Christians within those churches and I greatly admire their faith. Sometimes I wonder if Rich Mullins felt the same way. In a concert that was recorded shortly before his death, Rich says the following:

Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you’ve done it to me. And this is what I’ve come to think. That if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken

My blogging buddy Mike Golch at Rambling Stuff features a lot of hammered dulcimer music on his blog. Rich Mullins incorporated the hammered dulcimer in a lot of his songs. The first song that I want to feature is "Calling Out Your Name." The hammered dulcimer is featured prominently in this song, especially in the intro, plus they lyrics are very poetic and beautiful.

The second song I want to add is "Hold Me Jesus." This is a song that I always seem to gravitate to when things in my life get hectic and crazy and I need to feel comfort. Rich Mullins described it as a prayer that he wrote when temptation nearly got the better of him.

Come join Music Monday and share your songs with us. One simple rule, leave ONLY the actual post link here. You can grab this code at LJL Please note these links are STRICTLY for Music Monday participants only. All others will be deleted without prejudice.

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