BLUE LIKE JAZZ

Picture by Rick Bennett from his place near Chase

"In America, the first generation out of slavery invented jazz music.
It is a free-form expression.
It comes from the soul, and it is true."

Music has great power especially when the person singing, or playing, performs from the heart and the music has soul! I am taking time to listen to music more; for awhile it has been more listening to the radio; but like most people I now find I am turned off by religous broadcasting.

I grew up with cowboy music, which was often very sad but very popular on the praires. Now there are hymms that bring emotions from deep within me. I think this is true of what little I know about gazz, with its improvocation and swing. You can feel the sadness that comes to all of us at times in life. I will always love the music from the Vineyard church because the words drew me deeper into the love of Jesus and the beat expressed both joy and sorrow.

"Jesus, You are my rock in times of trouble.
I call out to you.
You lift me up when I fall down'
All through the storm Your love the anchor
My hope is in You alone."

Donald Miller in Blue like Jazz talks about the beginnings of his faith and how he encounter feelings of guilt, "which is something inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and a wrong in the universe. Guilt leads to lies when we are caught doing something wrong and we have no explanation or excuse. Confession is suppose to be good for the soul even when it is most painful and it is only real if it is painful.

We are created with the potential for goodness but often because we are so engrossed in our own inner world we fail to see how we need to change and stop blaming others.

"God was selling something that I wanted."
"The message, was somehow appealing to me.
God said He would make me new.
I can't pretend for a second I didn't want to be made new,
and that I didn't want to start again. I did"

"I couldn't give myself to Christianity because it was a religion for the intellectually naive. In order to believe Christianity, you either had to reduce enormous theological absurdities into children's stories or ignore them."

He goes on to explain how must story have a setting, characters and conflict; either internal or external, but a good novel has conflict. He questions the idea of original sin birthing conflict. The Bible tells us rebellion against God explains sin and conflict.

"If our lives were not experiencing some conflict, our hearts would not respond to the conflict in books or films."

There is no magical solution that can set us free. We cannot live on our experiences alone as the song ends and reality stares us in the face.