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WEED AND FEED
I had been hired for the night to play keyboards with a jazz-blues band in Seattle. Their regular piano-organ player had gotten ill and I was brought in as the local "gun for hire." It was Saturday night at a place called the New Orleans in Pioneer Square.
I arrived a couple of hours before our 9:00 PM start time to set up my keys, do a sound check and get a basic lay of the land - so to speak. I had worked with a couple of the band members before and knew about half of the thirty or so songs planned for the show which made me feel relatively at ease. The other half of the songs would have me sight-reading what are commonly referred to in music circles as "chord charts." (A chord chart is a type of sheet music using "chords" as notation instead of musical notes) As soon as the clock struck nine the band kicked it into a high gear and we began our musical jam.
The evening was going good. We had drawn a large crowd of energetic fans and I was having just about as much fun as one can have while getting paid. The gig was great! Great, that is, until “IT” happened. The dreaded musical “IT."
We were playing an old jazz standard song in a up-tempo bossa nova feel. Truth be told, it was more than just an up-tempo version. We were playing the song at about a-million miles per hour tempo. Warp speed. The rest of the band was digging deep into this hypersonic groove and I was just doing the best I could not make a mess of things on my end of the stage. We played through the verses and chorus a couple of times and I must admit that I thought this freight train tempo was a pretty cool musical arrangement. The whole crowd was into it - movin' and groovin' to the infectious beat. Just as the vocalist completed his last few chorus lines, the lead guitar player turned toward me and nodded his head in a way that was meant as a cue for me to begin to play an organ solo - one time through the whole song.
I launched into what I thought were some decent riffs but after about twenty or thirty seconds the dreaded “IT” hit me. "IT" is that thing that all musicians fear and at one time or another have all experienced - losing your place in the song. I had completely and totally - I mean totally - lost my place. I didn't just kind of lose my place. Not only did I have no idea where I was in the song - I had lost track of where "1" was. (For those of you who are non-musicians, musical measures are often divided into four beats of four counts - 1, 2, 3, 4 - repeated over and over again. All you need to know rhythmically to keep track of each measure is to have a clear sense of where the "1" is. That way if you get somehow twisted or turned around in a song you can find your way back at the next "1" which is the beginning of the next measure)
So there I stood facing a humiliating musical death. "IT" had happened. In a split second I had to make a decision on how to try to save myself - or to at least how to save myself from looking like a complete fool on stage. I a nano-second I hatched my plan. I would immediately try to play as many notes with my fingers as fast as I possibly could - it didn't matter what notes, just lots and lots of them - and just keep going like that until the vocalist came back in. That's when and how I would find my place again. And maybe if I played a billion notes at lightening speed no one would know what the heck I was doing therefore they wouldn't sense how lost I was. Yes, I would baffle the audience with my nimble finger acrobatics, thereby fooling them. So off I went for two long minutes of musical nonsense - just as fast as my fingers could fly with absolutely no clue as to where I was or where the song was going.
Amazingly enough, just as I had expected, at the end of my solo the singer came in and I found my place again. And then something unbelievable happened - the crowd cheered and whistled and hollered and roared for me as if I had just caught the winning touchdown pass in the final seconds of the Super Bowl! They cheered as if they had just witnessed the most brilliant keyboard-genius-soloist-ever performing at the top of his musical game.
Funny isn't it - I was so completely lost. I didn't want to embarrass myself by "looking" lost so I proceeded to fill up all of the empty space with just as much junk as I could possibly fit in. And what was the crowds reaction to my acrobatic folly - they cheered and thought that I was amazing.
I think that sometimes in life we live a lot like my keyboard-organ solo that night. We go as fast as we can and fill up our "lost" space with all kinds of junk. Not necessarily bad junk. We get a job, a career, work harder to climb the ladder, go back to school, get another fancy degree so we can make more money to by more things that take up more of our time. We buy a bigger house, a hot tub, a cooler car, another cool car and a boat. We go faster and faster playing more and more nonsense notes. We have children and take them to T-ball, soccer games, dance lessons and to music recitals. We get them involved in the right schools with the right classes and right teachers or home-school them so they'll do better and win awards and get big scholarships to the best universities so that they can get great jobs and make good money and fill up their lives with even more solo nonsense notes than we do. As super achievers, we become well thought of, well respected in our jobs in our communities and in our churches. Our children become part of the pretty people crowd wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, going to the right parties and the crowd cheers us on singing our praises and shouting "hurray for the success - praise to the ones with the biggest toys."
I wish I was making this stuff up but it is a fairly accurate description of many, many people - yes, Christian people - living in our modern day society.
What did Jesus say would snuff him out of our lives - was it prostitution, or drug addiction, or alcoholism or even murder? While I don’t recommend any involvement in those kinds of things Jesus said that it was "the cares of this world" that would squeeze Him out of our lives. The OK stuff - yes, too much of “the good stuff” would be the weeds that choke Him out of our lives.
So we run the race and win and in our society, in our culture, the crowd cheers us on. But what is the crowd really cheering for as they applaud our faster, bigger and better lifestyle? There is a place in the Bible just before Jesus is sentenced to death, where the crowd is cheering "Crucify, crucify Him.” Is it possible that without knowing it the crowd in our affluent societies of this modern world is cheering us on to "Crucify Him?"
So, too, is the Lord waiting for us to stop and listen for Him.
Matt 13:22
Luke 23:20-21
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