All Around Me

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I’m hip and cool enough to be a David Crowder fan.  One of his songs on his latest album is called “All Around Me”.  You can hear it below…

However, I’m not hip and cool enough to have known that this song is not a Crowder original.  He was actually covering (albeit VERY uniquely) a song by Flyleaf.  I’m not hip or cool enough to have even heard of this group, so imagine my shock when I looked them up on Youtube and found their video for this song to have nearly 13 million views!  If you’re intrigued to hear the very un-Crowder-like original (with an admittedly odd and random video), that is below…

The Struggle for Contentment

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I was riding the bus today.  I nearly never do, but I was today.  So I used the time to listen to a podcast.

The fellow was speaking about wealth and generosity and more.  He shared a few statistics about wealth: If your household income is over $40 000, you’re in the top 4% of the world.  If it’s over $50 ooo, you jump right into the top 1% of the world, the richest people on the planet.

Yet we never FEEL rich.

How does that work?

He proposed a very simple theory–we never feel rich because most of us spend a lot more time thinking about what we don’t have than about what we do have.

And that leads us away from contentment.

And that isn’t the direction I want to be walking.

The Nearness

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A friend gave me a listen to the new David Crowder album (Church Music).  If I were writing a review, I’d just say, “Oh baby!”  Take that as a “thumbs up”.

One of the songs that just grabs me is called “The Nearness”.  Below is a basic video of just album cover and lyrics to go with the music.  If you’ve never heard any of it, here’s a chance.  Enjoy!

The Weight I Carry

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Last Sunday, this video was part of our morning. I’ve had more-than-usual people comment about it since then.

Where I initially found this video online, a pile of comments were below. Many of them were people expressing dislike for the video because of the lack of closure that it ends with. But on Sunday, it served as the ideal illustration for the fact that life is tough and DOESN’T always wrap up with neat little bows.

From there, we moved on to discuss how we cope in such times. But I’m being reminded recently that many people bear much weight and that burdens come in all shapes and sizes. It’s little wonder a video like this connects with us.

But as we said on Sunday, the task before us in the life of faith is to allow the truth of “Life is tough” to be re-framed and outweighed by the greater truth that “We are the Beloved”.

That doesn’t reduce the weight. But it steadies our feet and it strengthens our shoulders.  And when you’re under a load, that can make all the difference.

Making Beautiful Music

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Credit where it’s due.  Blair first showed me this.

For some reason it came storming back into my mind over supper tonight.  A quick re-viewing confirmed its blog-worthiness, though after you watch it, you may be questioning the worthiness of such blogs.  I leave you to your own questions.  For now, I give you a real piece of work and this small piece of advice: Watch his eyebrows.