Songs

How do you sing to God a new song?  I wonder is it completely new?  Is it new words from your heart to a familiar tune?  If you had to write a new song to God...which don't laugh because my guess is that many hymn writers did not really think of themselves as professional musicians but as people of faith who wanted to share the good news.  Many of the great hymns are actually sung to tunes that people sang in the bar the night before church.  This was done to take something familiar and turn it on its head...give it new meaning and life.  Could you take a tune from today's culture and transform it with the words of faith spinning and stirring in your heart?  But I digress.

If you had to write a new song to God...where might you start?
With the melody?
With the words?
With a free association of thoughts?
How would you refine it?
Who would you share it with to get feedback and edits?

The world needs new songs.  We need fresh words from you.  Honestly, I get tired of my words.  I am most often inspired by the new words people are singing about God's love today.  People who awaken my imagination.  Often, if I am listening, there is not an hour that goes by where I won't hear some kind of thought/idea/insight that could be a new song to God.

But far too often those wonderful words float off into thin air never to return again.

We need to record our words on paper.
We need to let them simmer and steep like a good, rich tea/coffee/marinated.
We need to keep testing and trying out.

In some ways, a sermon is nothing more than the pastor's attempt to offer a fresh word week after week.  And when coupled with the truism that most pastors have only about 10 sermons roaming around us that we keep recycling and re-purposing and rephrasing...there are many ways to say the same thing.  Which brings me to verse 20, we urgently wait for God?

Where are you urgently waiting for God right now?  In your health, relationship, connection to the sacred flow?
How are you urgently waiting?  Is it like a doctor's office passively waiting for God to call your name or are you actively saying, "Um, God, I am still here?"  Or are you out listening for that new, fresh song God might be trying to sing to you through someone in your life?

So, two challenges:
1.  Listen urgently for God this day and week.
2.  When you sense the stirring of the sacred, speak and sing a new, fresh song to God.

Because...the world needs to hear it AND you need to share it.

Amen.