kinetic > frenetic > confess > express:

Here I go, pecking the same fields again. At some point, I’m bound to get very torqued that worshiping God has to be so painful.
So I’m sitting here working on Sunday’s worship and realize that some things I vowed never to let get in my way, are knocking at the door of mind. Tempos, intrumentation, style. As I’m working, I’m listening to Vineyard’s “i love your presence” . “All to Jesus I surrender” is so relaxed, slow and reflective. It actually sounds like a song of commitment that expresses something that has taken place in the heart and is being verbalized - or at least something that demands to be dealt with in the heart.
So I guess I should toss in here one of my beefs. Where have we gotten the idea that energy requires motion? Stored energy is of great power. Why have we come to believe that there is nothing worthwhile in a congregational song unless it makes us tap our feet and clap our hands? Of course there is nothing wrong with slow songs, we just need to play them fast. Often during rehearsal or sound checks, I have folks say/ask, you really didn’t mean to play that so slow did you? I sense that people feel that songs shouldn’t be about reflection. The lyric needn’t be about expression, we express our joy with our hands. Invariably, if I bow my head and leave a moment between songs, someone will point out between services that I need to figure out how to “close up that hole” in the sequence. I can say that hole is a part of the sequence, but they’ll say, “it shouldn’t be”. Gotta keep the energy up you know.
I wonder if the bottom line is that we really don’t have time in our busy lives to go to church and leave everything else and really enter a frame of heart that allows us to communion with God. We bring ourselves to show up there, but unless it is wall to wall activity and as fast paced as our lives, our minds will have time to go back to our lives and we’ll be distracted by the things that we wish we were taking care of while we’re “sacrificing” some time for God. It is indicative of the unengaged way we show up in the house of God.
Ok, the CD is still spinning, and now “When I survey” is playing. At this tempo, I think it will still be playing through supper. Is there a balance between the disengaged, get-it-overwith, approach, and the self-indulgent, slow-means-authentic, misunderstanding?
You see why I don’t want tempo to be one of those things that distract me?
Arrgh.