© Copyright 2005 Bill Nesbitt

December 13, 2005 — Holidays, cool, occasional rain. Fall ended beautifully and lasted awhile. Very nice end to 2005, so far.

God sometimes is a very distant semi-reality; sometimes He seems nearer than my own family. Does that depend entirely on me -- my attitudes, my speech, my habits? "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." I always thought that was for the sweet by-and-by, and maybe it is for the most part. But maybe I can "see" God in the here-and-now if my heart is pure. A pure heart is one that seeks God in all things -- i.e., pure in motive. My heart can never be sin-free in this life. Even if my actions are good and right, my heart will always beat to the rhythm of Adam. But if my heart looks for God at all times -- my heart will find God, "see" God.

"Open the eyes of my heart, Lord, open the eyes of my heart, I want to see You, I want to see You." God, remove the blinders of selfishness and let my heart see You "high and lifted up, shining in the light of Your glory."

I can't make You real to me. All I can do is seek Your face and let You do the rest, according to Your good pleasure.
___

I'm seeing my role in the Body as musician more and more, thought I'm still not entirely sure how that works. I used to almost resent it when people would say, "Could you bring your guitar to such-and-such meeting?" Is that all I'm good for to you? Somehow it seemed I was being shoved into a pigeonhole of lesser respect. There's the rub — respect. If I'm so concerned with my self-esteem and the respect of my peers, it won't matter what I'm doing. I'll be useless. I'll only be serving myself and will miss out on God's blessing because of my selfishness. But if my motive is to serve God and His people, and those people are ministered to by what I do, then I will continue doing it for as long as I can. And if something happens so that I can't render that particular service anymore, I'll find something else I can do.
___

February 4, 2006— Been awhile. Weather is very mild with an occasional cool snap. Some nice rain.

Holidays were off a bit. I think I've finally lost completely the excitement of Christmas morning. I had maintained it well into adulthood, lately transferring it over to the children, till this year. Maybe part of it is the youngest made it official that there is no Santa. I explained to him a couple of years ago that I believe in the Spirit of Christmas embodied in the love of Christ that St. Nicholas showed many centuries ago. This year, though, it seemed the mystery was finally gone. Kind of a shame, if you ask me. Not to say Christmas morning wasn't fun. Just mystery-free.

Got the MP3 player about loaded -- only about 2 gigabytes to go, maybe another 20 albums or so. Then I'll cull some and make more room on it. It's a 6 GB Creative Zen player. Pretty good, though it doesn't cold-boot very well. If I plug it into the wall adapter, though, it'll boot every time. It's interesting, I've got it loaded with more than 100 Django songs, entire box sets of Flatt and Scruggs, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Jimmy Martin, June Carter, Tony Rice, old Appalachian folksingers, ... no worship music. The closest thing is a Voices of Ascension CD of Renaissance choral music, which I do consider to be worship music -- maybe in the highest form yet attained by humans, which is interesting, since it was all written 400 years ago and further back. But no modern worship music. I just don't find it interesting to listen to or challenging to learn. It's fun to play, especially with the worship band on Sundays (that's become a more or less regular thing with the Journey Church -- more on that later) and it's fun to lead in small groups, and I do feel led into God's presence when playing and leading it. It's just not what I listen to on my headphones, and it's not what I sit down and work out on the guitar. What I do work on mostly is the old Django stuff -- talk about fun! I'll never get it, but it's fun trying.

Also, the stuff I lead in small group is mostly songs I've known for five or six years. Playing guitar with the band doesn't really afford me the opportunity to learn the new stuff to the point where I feel confident enough to lead it. This is something I'll need to work on, assuming I want to move forward with songs that are less than five years old. Of course I've written some songs, but not in the last few months. I doubt I'll be writing any worship songs with half-dimished or augmented seventh chords set in a cut-time swing beat.

I read a book called "Blue Like Jazz." Didn't care for it much. Don't tell Denise, since she gave it to me for Christmas. (The whole "Christmas" word controversy didn't affect me much, by the way... in the first place, it seems awfully close to "wrangling over words." Secondly, I'm not Catholic, so I've never taken "Christ-Mass.") It was at times funny, at times poignant and at times thought-provoking. The author talked about God a lot, but also about how bad Republican Religious Fundamentalists (like me) are, and how cool and loving all the atheists and pot-smokers are. But I don't care so much about all that; the real problem was the underlying flavor I got from the whole thing that God isn't really there, so we might just as well admit we're stuck here alone and deal with it the best we can. Reading this book alongside Spurgeon's "Being God's Friend" was an interesting experience. Were both of these guys worshiping the same God? The "Blue Like Jazz" guy is probably OK. Maybe it's just so far into the whole post-modern, angst-ridden Emerging thing that I just can't relate to it. Tough being an adult sometimes.

I started another book called "Holiness, Truth and the Presence of God" by Francis Frangipane. I'm only in the first chapter, but already I may have landed on something. The word for the day (month? year?) is HUMILITY. Since God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, shouldn't it follow that God would humble me in order to enable me to accept His grace? Maybe that's what the last two years have been about. Probably more than two years, because I had already begun to feel a bit useless before losing my job, like I was being shuffled around, waiting for the hammer to drop while they decided what to do with me. Turned out all the years I had spent there learning about the company and the business and honing my skills didn't matter a whit when it came to post-merger body counts. I was just one more warm body who didn't want to relocate to palmetto-infested Florida.

Then I fully expected within a few weeks for God to ring the phone and tell me where I was next to put my considerable talents to use ... but no ring. Then, after a year and a half of self-doubt and wandering in the desert, the phone rang. It was Mark, asking me to teach his kid to play guitar. I said no, then no, then finally okay. Now, after four months, I've about decided that it was God ringing the phone.

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