To quote Shrek, "Stop singing!"

I went and listened to some of them pod casts again. One in particular came, in my opinion, one year too late. Better late than never, I guess.

Some of my earlier posts on this blog concerned my frustrations with music. Singing "church songs" for me just didn't feel like worship. I compromised and decided to silently focus on the words if I wasn't going to sing out of sincerity. It evened out to fifty percent of the time.

Earlier this year, I learned that was having a negative affect on those closest to me. So, like it or not, I decided that I'd sing. And to be honest, it hadn't felt obligatory since.

Obligatory. That's what I'm struggling with nowadays, the flawed assumption that following Christ is one uncomfortable obligation after another. What about the freedom of becoming more of who you were meant to be? Shouldn't you be, in a sense, more yourself? This is the struggle, and I'm slowly coming through it. This brings me to the podcast.

The message, a summary of which I'm pasting a link to below, springboards off of some Psalms and articulates what I needed to hear. I appreciate most what it has to say about being reminded of More and the subversive act of submission. If done right, it's not about performance.

http://www.marshill.org/userfiles/Why%20To%20Sing.pdf

A couple of important points were not covered in the summary.

1. Music used to be about participation, but in recent years, it became a product. Now it's all about performance and recognizing the one on stage. "Maybe singing feels weird to us because we are out of practice."
2. The band leading the music takes a back seat. It should sound incomplete until the entire congregation joins in. The worship experience isn't mine, it's ours.

I'm not saying I agree with everything preached in Mars Hill messages, even though I find something good in them ninety percent of the time. Still, this is the first time I heard more than just "do it because you have to". I'm just glad I know that now. Besides, if the word "subversive" is attached, I'm so in.