Who Are You Singing For?

Taken from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/abraham/detail?entry_id=38580.

Susan Boyle: Just Who Is The Singer Susan Boyle?

Unless you live under a rock, you know about the Scottish woman who has taken the industrialized world by storm: Susan Boyle.

Ms. Boyle, who appeared on a reality TV show called “Britains’ Got Talent” last Saturday, April 11th and wowed a cynical audience and the judges, including the irascible Simon Cowell (also of American Idol) with her powerful performance of “I Dream A Dream” from Les Miserable has took the World by Internet storm.

What surprised millions – and does not make a great statement about our World industrial culture but is a great example of the power of online video distribution as the video has been seen over 15.9 million times on YouTube (I counted over 10 videos with over 200,000 views) as of this writing – is that someone who looks like her could sing like that.

But who Susan Boyle is as a person is a story of a good simple woman winning over a bad, complicated society. Ms. Boyle is 48 years old, unemployed, and she says never married or “kissed” which means she’s a virgin. I do not laugh here because I think of her more as pure rather than question anyone’s desire for her or perceived lack of same.

The worldwide sensation lives in her childhood home in West Lothian, one of 32 council areas in Scotland, and which has Grapevine, Texas as its sister city according to Wikipedia, meaning they can claim her too.

Ms. Boyle cared for her mother until the elder Boyle’s passing in 2007 at the age of 91; her father passed away 10 years before. Living alone, Susan attends church each weekend and it was there that her singing talent developed, and where her late mother encouraged her to sing, but Boyle had reportedly stopped singing and did not know how she would do on that Saturday night she shocked the world.

Susan’s life has not been one without pain. Sadly, she was starved of oxygen at birth and has a learning disability because of the accident. Ms. Boyle says she was abused and teased by classmates, and reportedly the scars of their comments remain to this day.

What I identify with about Ms. Boyle is, I myself having lost two fathers (my stepfather and my biological dad) to prostate cancer in 2005, and the same year my Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer (she’s still with me), one becomes painfully aware of their own mortality, that of others, and the desire to “make one’s mark” becomes ever intense. Susan Boyle’s stirring song was as much a testimate to the power of the human sprit and a form of grieving as it was a display of talent. Susan wanted to make her mom smile, but in doing so made mothers all over the World smile — my Mom called and said Boyle was the next Julie Andrews.

So, in a World of nasty pirates, mean internet commenters, and crazy right-wing extremists, we have to stop and embrace Susan Boyle for making us smile.

When I read this article, I smiled. I don’t think she ever stopped singing. Have you ever wondered why some of the people with the most beautiful voices happen to be Christians who attend church regularly for many years on end, rain or shine? Firstly, our praise and worship session is a weekly hour-long (sometimes longer) “choir” practice where we sing with all our hearts because it’s for a mighty God to hear. Secondly, God simply deserves the best, and He pampers Himself by giving the best vocal chords to us. Now do you still wonder why every world renowned diva from the United States, from Mariah Carey to Whitney Houston, came from the choir team of churches?

And no, your looks never did matter to God. +)

I Am Barabbas

This thought keeps going through my mind today: I am Barabbas.

Imagine what that Friday must have been like for him. He was sitting in a jail cell awaiting his execution. He knew it was the last day of his life. It was the end. There was no hope. Then he hears the crowd chanting his name and the next thing he knows he’s a free man. The charges are dropped. His life that was almost over starts over. And a sinless man named Jesus literally takes his place. He expected to die. He deserved to die. But his execution, in the sovereign plan of God, was scheduled on the same day Jesus was arrested.

If ever there was a picture of II Corinthians 5:21 this is it: “God made him who knew no sin to become sin for us.”

I am Barabbas.

Taken from the Batterson Blog at http://evotional.com/2009/04/i-am-barabbas.html.

Others May, You Cannot

If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. – Matthew 16:24-25

If God has called you to be truly like Jesus in all your spirit, He will draw you into a life of crucifixion and humility. He will put on you such demands of obedience that you will not be allowed to follow other Christians. In many ways, He seems to let other good people do things which He will not let you do.

Others who seem to be very religious and useful may push themselves, pull wires, and scheme to carry out their plans, but you cannot. If you attempt it, you will meet with such failure and rebuke from the Lord as to make you sorely penitent.

Others can brag about themselves, their work, their successes, their writings, but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing. If you begin to do so, He will lead you into some deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good works.

Others will be allowed to succeed in making great sums of money, or having a legacy left to them, or in having luxuries, but God may supply you only on a day-to-day basis, because He wants you to have something far better than gold, a helpless dependence on Him and His unseen treasury.

The Lord may let others be honored and put forward while keeping you hidden in obscurity because He wants to produce some choice, fragrant fruit for His coming glory, which can only be produced in the shade.

God may let others be great, but keep you small. He will let others do a work for Him and get the credit, but He will make you work and toil without knowing how much you are doing. Then, to make your work still more precious, He will let others get the credit for the work which you have done; this to teach you the message of the Cross, humility, and something of the value of being cloaked with His nature.

The Holy Spirit will put a strict watch on you, and with a jealous love rebuke you for careless words and feelings, or for wasting your time, which other Christians never seem distressed over.

So make up your mind that God is an infinite Sovereign and has a right to do as He pleases with His own, and that He may not explain to you a thousand things which may puzzle your reason in His dealings with you.

God will take you at your word. If you absolutely sell yourself to be His slave, He will wrap you up in a jealous love and let other people say and do many things that you cannot. Settle it forever; you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit, He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue or chaining your hand or closing your eyes in ways which others are not dealt with. However, know this great secret of the Kingdom: When you are so completely possessed with the Living God that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over this peculiar, personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of the Holy Spirit over your life, you will have found the vestibule of heaven, the high calling of God.

Written by C. D. Watson

The Holy Inefficiency of Henri Nouwen

Once when I was dining with a group of writers, the conversation turned to letters we get from readers. Richard Foster and Eugene Peterson mentioned an intense young man who had been seeking spiritual direction from both of them. They responded as best they could, answering questions by mail and recommending books on spirituality. Foster had just learned that the same inquirer had also contacted Henri Nouwen. “You won’t believe what Nouwen did,” he said. “He invited this stranger to live with him for a month so he could mentor him in person.”

Most writers jealously protect their schedules and privacy. Nouwen, who died of a heart attack this past September, broke down such barriers of professionalism. His entire life, in fact, displayed a “holy inefficiency.”

Trained in Holland as a psychologist and a theologian, Nouwen spent his early years achieving. He taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard, averaged more than a book a year, and traveled widely as a conference speaker. He had a resume to die for—which was the problem, exactly. The pressing schedule and relentless competition were suffocating his own spiritual life.

Nouwen went to South America for six months, scouting a new role for himself as a missionary in the Third World. A hectic speaking schedule on his return to the United States only made things worse. Finally, Nouwen fell into the arms of the L’Arche community in France, a home for the seriously disabled. He felt so nourished by them that he agreed to become priest in residence at a similar home in Toronto called Daybreak. There, Nouwen spent his last ten years, still writing and traveling to speak here and there, but always returning to the haven of Daybreak.

I once visited Nouwen, sharing lunch with him in his small room. It had a single bed, one bookshelf, and a few pieces of Shaker-style furniture. The walls were unadorned except for a print of a Van Gogh painting and a few religious symbols. A Daybreak staff person served us a bowl of Caesar salad and a loaf of bread. No fax machine, no computer, no Daytimer calendar posted on the wall—in this room, at least, Nouwen had found serenity. The church “industry” seemed very far away.

After lunch we celebrated a special Eucharist for Adam, the young man Nouwen looked after. With solemnity, but also a twinkle in his eye, Nouwen led the liturgy in honor of Adam’s twenty-sixth birthday. Unable to talk, walk, or dress himself, profoundly retarded, Adam gave no sign of comprehension. He seemed to recognize, at least, that his family had come. He drooled throughout the ceremony and grunted loudly a few times.

Later Nouwen told me it took him nearly two hours to prepare Adam each day. Bathing and shaving him, brushing his teeth, combing his hair, guiding his hand as he tried to eat breakfast-these simple, repetitive acts had become for him almost like an hour of meditation.

I must admit I had a fleeting doubt as to whether this was the best use of the busy priest’s time. Could not someone else take over the manual chores? When I cautiously broached the subject with Nouwen himself, he informed me that I had completely misinterpreted him. “I am not giving up anything,” he insisted. “It is I, not Adam, who gets the main benefit from our friendship.”

All day Nouwen kept circling back to my question, bringing up various ways he had benefitted from his relationship with Adam. It had been difficult for him at first, he said. Physical touch, affection, and the messiness of caring for an uncoordinated person did not come easily. But he had learned to love Adam, truly to love him. In the process he had learned what it must be like for God to love us—spiritually uncoordinated, retarded, able to respond with what must seem to God like inarticulate grunts and groans. Indeed, working with Adam had taught him the humility and “emptiness” achieved by desert monks only after much discipline.

Nouwen has said that all his life two voices competed inside him. One encouraged him to succeed and achieve, while the other called him simply to rest in the comfort that he was “the beloved” of God. Only in the last decade of his life did he truly listen to that second voice.

Ultimately Nouwen concluded that “the goal of education and formation for the ministry is continually to recognize the Lord’s voice, his face, and his touch in every person we meet.” Reading that description in his book ¡Gracias!, I understand why he did not think it a waste of time to invite a seeking stranger to live with him for a month, or to devote two hours a day to the menial care of Adam.

I will miss Henri Nouwen. For some, his legacy consists of his many books, for others his role as a bridge between Catholics and Protestants, for others his distinguished career at Ivy League universities. For me, though, a single image captures him best: the energetic priest, hair in disarray, using his restless hands as if to fashion a homily out of thin air, celebrating an eloquent birthday Eucharist for an unresponsive child-man so damaged that many parents would have had him aborted. A better symbol of the Incarnation, I can hardly imagine.

Written by renowned Christian author Philip Yancey in http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1996/december9/6te080.html.

Single-mindedness vs. Double minded-ness

Are there days when you wonder how come your mind is so complex? Are there moments when you find yourself schizophrenic, doing things that you know you shouldn’t be doing, and not doing things you know you should be doing? Paul warns us in Galatians 5:17 that the Spirit and our sinful nature are contrary to one another, and that sin is the reason behind such impulse and hesitancy (Romans 7:20). If you’re suffering from it, fear not, for you’re not alone. I would like to share with you this beautiful poem by Edward Sanford Martin, so as to remind ourselves of our dependence on the Almighty God for grace in times of such apparent double-mindedness.

Within my earthly temple there’s a crowd,

There’s one of us that’s humble, one that’s proud.

There’s one that’s broken-hearted for his sins,

There’s one that unrepentant sits and grins…

From much corroding care would I be free,

If once I could determine which is me.