“On every side I am tossed by the waves of business, and sunk by storms, so that I may truly say, ‘I have come into the depth of the sea, and the storm has overwhelmed me’ (Psalm 68:3). After business I long to return to my heart; but, driven therefrom by vain tumults of thoughts, I am unable to return…”

This tension isn’t a feature unique to modern life. It has always been a challenge, from Mary and Martha until now. No, even further back, to the Garden and the Fall, when our previously joyful work was cursed to come at the expense of thorns and sweat. This struggle is not new. That is encouraging—for we are not alone—but it is also eye-opening: the tension is not going to go away until all things are made right. To avoid it would mean either isolating ourselves and shirking responsibility or being consumed by busyness and missing out on God in the process. It’s not a tension we can grow past, but at least it’s one we can grow through.

The telltales for me are my spiritual rhythms. When I’m serving in my own strength, gritting my teeth and pushing through, I grow fruit of bitterness and frustration instead of love, and my temporary happiness comes either from people’s opinions of me or from some subjective measurement of how much of my task list I’ve accomplished. That is the fruit of Martha living.

Instead, when I’m faithful in consistently practicing spiritual rhythms like silence, solitude, prayer, and scripture meditation, I am able joyfully to live in the middle of the tension and while experiencing the fruit of the Spirit and seeing God do kingdom work through me. Instead of temporary happiness, I experience deep joy from the Spirit. The difference is death versus life, slavery versus freedom, exhaustion versus empowerment. The Northumbria Community’s Aidan Compline says it well:

May the virtue of our daily work
hallow our nightly prayers.
May our sleep be deep and soft
so our work be fresh and hard.

Our God-given work ought be holy, fresh, and hard—but in order to be so, it must be in balance with our rest. It is the healthy tension between work and rest which gives each its meaning. Without holy work, our rest is simply inactivity. Without hearty rest, our work is simply activity. Between them, empowered by the Spirit, we live in healthy tension.

Welcome to the blog, friends from the 2011 Inner Journey spiritual disciplines retreat! What a great time. I loved spending a weekend in worship with you all.

Below is the resource list I mentioned at the retreat for practicing prayer and the daily offices.

Click on any title to view that book at Amazon.

The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn & Wintertime	The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime
The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime	The Divine Hours: Pocket Edition
Celtic Daily Prayer	Prayers Across the Centuries
Mosaic Bible Imi. Leather	Mosaic Bible Hardcover

For my attempt, I’m fairly pleased with the results. The sound is pretty transparent. It’s a good circuit, not a tone killer like most of the cheap comps out there. In fact, I’ve found it to be transparent enough to double as a clean boost pedal. It has enough gain to drive my amp well into distortion without adding too much noise.

In case you’re interested, Small Bear Electronics and the Thaishine eBay store are great resources for parts, and there are a ton of sites out there with various schematics, such as Keen’s GeoFex and General Guitar Gadgets. I’m thinking about trying to build an octave-up pedal next.

(click the pics for larger versions)

Especially if you aren’t used to working with lighting, it’s easy to default to traditional methods of changing the look of your stage. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes building a set, repainting walls, or working with huge yardages of fabric can be exactly the thing, and the result can look really cool. On the other hand, that can also cost a lot of money, require lots of shopping trips, and consume massive amounts of staff time & volunteer time. One of the best things about lighting is that it allows for major look changes at a fraction of the time and cost.

One of our lighting problems has been the cream-colored chancel wall that backs our stage. It’s roughly the same color as human skin, so when we tried to light up people’s faces with the par cars far above the stage, the light spill on the wall would work against us, making everyone’s faces blend in to a cream-colored mess. For us, the nontraditional answer was to light the chancel differently.

The patterns on the back wall in the pictures above (and in the previous post about Easter) were made by putting easily-changeable gobos (metal disc patterns) in two ellipsoidal lights mounted on our back wall. The colors you see in the pics are readily available gels inserted in frames mounted to the lights. Especially if you buy used equipment, it’s not particularly expensive or difficult to get looks like the ones above. If you want to give it a shot at your church, I’ll be glad to try to answer any questions you have about equipment, sources, etc.

Here is a straight-off-the-board, raw recording from Sunday:

…and here is a chord chart (PDF).