"Surprised by Joy"

Better World Books gave me the opportunity to write a guest blog post for them, on C.S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy. Check it out here. Feel free to comment, either here or on the BWB page!

On the Arts:

"If you want to work on your art, work on your life."

~ ANTON CHEKHOV

Thanks to "Advice to Writers" for tweeting this quote.

Style of music?

The following post is from my other blog about church music and worship.

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The following quotes are from an article on the 9Marks website, entitled "How important is the style of music a church sings?" Go check the whole thing out here - it gives some good perspective on what's really important about church music.

[More important than style] are the truth of the words being sung. Since a church sings music in order to worship God, our songs should function like a musical confession of faith. Those confessions of faith should contain substantial truth about God, or else we’ll hardly be worshiping at all.

Style is passing... It’s only worth paying attention to insofar as different styles may do a better or worse job of helping people properly conform their hearts to the truths being sung.

In short, what we sing is far more important than how we sing it.

The kicker is this: hopefully we can be selfLESS, and prefer our fellow saints as we choose songs and sing them in certain styles, rather than being selfISH, choosing and playing songs based on what we prefer. Or, being selfish by wanting certain songs in certain styles, and being bitter when we don't get to sing them. Singing on a Sunday morning is a corporate opportunity to encourage and admonish each other. So lets do that this Sunday!

Guidelines.

Another teaching year finishes this week, and I'm trying to think hard about what I'll read over the summer. I haven't settled on a concrete list yet, but here are some guidelines I've been thinking through, to hopefully make my summer reading as rich as possible.

1. We only have a relatively short amount of time to use well or waste in this life. So I'm going to try to read important things, that I know will be beneficial. I also want to read things I enjoy, and/or work by authors I like. I'm realizing more and more that real, honest-to-goodness reading happens with the stuff that interests and excites us. This is the stuff that we won't regret having read (most likely anyway).

2. I want to write more in the near future, so a couple books on how to write well will be in order. A re-reading of The Elements of Style may be a worthy choice, among others.

3. I'm sure I'll end up picking away at more books than I should probably have going at one time. But I'm trying to convince myself that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Multiple perspectives, multiple subjects, multiple voices. However, one does have to be careful not to lose track of the content of the books one has going.

A hearty "three cheers" for summer.