In Awe of the One Who Gave It All

This morning started like any other morning that had come before it, well, perhaps a bit happier. I had just gotten back from business travel in upstate NY and was more than eager to get back into the swing of things, back in my favorite place on the globe: Fredericksburg, Virginia. Now I know I will get some chuckles for this one because so many of my friends have spent their whole lives trying to pry themselves away from it, but I have a certain fondness for the tree and suburb filled chunk of dirt. This probably stems from a tendency to gravitate toward the familiar.

So, to continue in my well worn pattern, I wake up in the morning and read my Bible. I start to flip back to the place where I had left off (Ephesians 4, for those curious) on my quest to read the New Testament by the start of August, and I realize something. I have been spending too much time with Paul. I miss Jesus.

Now, just to make it clear, I am well aware that I was no further away, this morning, from Christ himself from the moment of my salvation, to the heights of the life defining mountaintop experiences throughout my life, but after reading so much good scripture about Jesus' death and resurrection, I really wanted to hear something from Jesus himself (this in and of itself testifies to the worth of Paul's writings). So I did what anyone who wants to find some red letters, and wants to find them fast, does: I flipped to Matthew and landed on chapter 13.

Now, do I believe that the most accurate way to get what God wants you to know is through "random" bible page flipping? Not a chance (of course, true random chance does not exist in this universe, but that's a discussion for another time) . If God spoke purely though "chance" or arbitrary page flipping, I would carry a set of Boggle dice in my pocket to make decisions. But I am sane, and I know that we come to God on His terms, not ours, so I don't. But that does not mean, that sometimes, God does not speak to us though means that seem "chance like" upon first inspection.

Here is what I flipped to:

He who has ears, let him hear. "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.

After the immediate feelings of the sheer happiness (no I am not trying to be overly fakey spiritual about this, I am telling the truth) of hearing the words of the immortal creator in human flesh, I had realised something. "I think I've been getting this passage wrong for awhile!". Every time I read a passage again, I usually will notice something else will stand out since last reading, but this was different, and it wa something that helped me immensely, and you will see why as I explain:

In previous readings I had understood the one to find the treasure and the field to be the believer, the one who sells it all to gain the kingdom of God. But, presently, I am pretty sure that I was wrong before, and that Christ was talking about himself in this instance. Now, would it be good for a person "sell it all" and gain the kingdom of God, ideally? Yes.

But that would be great, if it was not impossible.

Because I have nothing.

I started with nothing.

All of my work to amass worth of my own even to transfer to God's cause will amount to no more than nothing. Even the work that I do for the kingdom is not mine to give, but is done in His name, meaning I am permitted to do the work while the glory of the job completely bypasses myself and goes directly to God.

Christ is not teling us what to do in this passage (Matthew 13), He is simply giving us the current state of things, telling us how things are (Christ does command us to follow Him in certain ways, but this passage does not appear to be one of these). And this becomes fairly clear when the verses in question are not removed from the context ofthe other paravles in this passage: the sower, the wheat and the tares, the mustard seed and the dividing of the fish. (We are clearly not the sifters or the fish sorters)

Now the reason that I am sharing this with you: I believe that we can get so caught up in trying to do things that only God can do properly, that we miss the point, that we cannot do this on our own, we cannot buy His favor, or earn His fondness. The works will naturally (new-naturally, that is) come out in us through the Holy Spirit's changing work in us, but that is all Him and in no way ours.

I want to remind you that He found us. In the dirt. From clam's mouth in the mucky part of the shallows. And that we are His treasure and He hold's us very dearly. Dearly enough to give up what was entitled to Him and take on what He did not deserve.

I think that sometimes, it is easy for a Christian to forget that He loves us so much.

Idea for some new Worship helper software

After a few years of doing the whole leading Worship music thing, I have noticed that getting a set list organized and together can be a little bit of a chore. I know that some churches and ministries have enough of a division of labor to adequately deal with this: one person is in charge of the music, another in charge of doing the slides or lyrics ordering, another who does the video and audio media organizing, but I would imagine, that in some smaller ministries, there are a few people who wear a lot of these hats simultaneously.

Now don't get me wrong, I love doing it all, but there are a few steps in the process that could be eradicated altogether with a correctly written piece of software. I actually write software for a living, solving people's problems by way of better way of getting computers to kill repetitive dumb tasking by humans, and freeing them up to make decisions.

To illustrate this point, here is something I do every time I need to get a piece of music together:

1. Get a chord sheet, either off of the Internet or some that has come with a companion cd from a book. Sometimes, I just type them up myself because they are needed for the instrumentalists.

2. Next I ether use an existing key, guess a good alternate key, or whip out the acoustic guitar and sing by trial and error for the purpose of establishing a good key that the song should be in (basically, a sanity check on the chords picked, making sure they fit my vocal range)

3. Transpose the song to the new key, usually using a little free online app made for that purpose (http://logue.net/xp)

4. Next, I usually do another transposition, to adjust the chords to more same ones using a capo.

5. After this, I print music for all of the people who will need it, most of the times, I print differently transposed versions: one for the guitarists using a capo, and the others for everyone else.

6. Next, I take the chord sheets and strip out all of the chords and use them to paste into slides for presentation use.

7. Then, I format the slides for presentation (using dreambeam)

As you can see this process uses a few pieces of things in different places. It is my desire, to pull all of this functionality into one piece of software, so that I can save the time, not just for myself (hopefully, the effort will eventually pay for itself in reclaimed time for just myself alone) but optimistically for other people as well. I hope to also make it as professional as any other bit of work that I normally do, hopefully, I want to outdo other applications that do little parts of this process, such as dreambeam, or commercial packages like PowerPoint(tm) and MediaShout(tm)

Now to be up front, if this software really became useful, I would probably want to market it, but I would probably sell it for a little cheaper (possibly hundreds of dollars cheaper) than software that handles just the presentation portion of this.

Here are some things that I have brainstormed up that I would want in a worship helper program, let me know if you can think of any other things that would be helpful:

Brainstorming For Worship Helper Program

• Set Planner mode (all bout getting the overrching music set up and running, user will go into song planning mode from her for the purpose of adding new songs to the the setlist, If there are songs in the setlist already, then song planning mode will not need to be entered )

  • Easy theme construction (with quick updating preview)

  • Automatic song set planner based on certain song parameters.

  • Calendar for sets / personnel management

• online component, for consumption by band members,

  • might publish files to existing services, like blogs or other pre-existent online calendars

  • worse comes to worse, this might need to be its own web script, one that takes in XML files and then parses them

• Song Planning mode (all about getting a certain song ready for playing)

  • Transposition

  • Chord sheet parsing

    • use of lyrics in presentation slides (Create song from Chord sheet)

    • Clickable chord sheets, allowing a the user to look up chords or hear the chords when clicked on

  • Song sheet / Chord Sheet printing (selective, accounting for capo use on guitars)

  • Allowing the order to be set properly for the chord sheets to match the slides and vice versa

  • Saving attachments to songs, like pdf or gif or jpeg chord or music sheets.

  • Guitar chord library

  • Piano Chord library

  • Simple Mouse Clickable keyboard, for the purpose of establishing proper range of a song

• Worship Planning Mode (final presentation step, this is the mode that will control how things go to the screen will show how things will work in presentation mode)

• slide types – that can be placed inside of the order of worship:

  • Intro (Countdown + music) mode

  • Worship Music Mode (“slidesets” songs will be grouped as a collection of slides, not just a single slide)

  • Graphical Mode

  • Video mode

  • Teaching notes mode / Bible verse mode

• Easy rearrangement of slides and slidesets

• possible printing of lyrics only songsheets and order of worship bulletins

• Presentation mode (this mode will control all that goes to the screen during a worship service)

  • Dual monitor Support

  • Easy and intuitive control allowing the use of either mouse, keyboard, or other types of controls that are used especially to control presentation software (power point does this well, but dream beam does not do as good of job with this)

  • easy backtracking to certain points in a song, such as the ability to immediately go back to a chorus or a certain verse. This needs to not require use of the mouse / touchpad as dream beam does.

• Secondary requirements (things that might be nice to have in a program):

  • Slide transitions

  • Really pretty nonstandard interface, maclike (possibly black and shiny and glossy?)

  • Potential Mac OSX compatibility (or at least, not making any design decisions that would preclude the future use of the OSX platform)