Reflections

After listening to Rick's take on the David and Bathsheba debacle, I took some time to reflect. It certainly forced some honest introspection. I highly recommend it. The reflection, that is; not the debacle. I thought I would share what came out of my exercise. I call it, "Ode in Fear of Man."

Oblivious. Desiring ignorance. Claiming ignorance.
Denying culpability...emphatically...pathetically.
Hypothetically begging the question. Change the topic of conversation.
Did you hear the news today?
Can you believe they? Did you see...? The audacity. The atrocity.
Please buy my glittering generalities. Here's another hyperbole...
But back to me? Back to you!
True.

Why try to fight the fighter?
For fear of the fight or fear of the night after?
I know I'll lose...
My sense of security is as secure as my teeth.
False.

It's a lost cause; lost in the shuffle of thought and word.
Why are we here again? Is this really necessary?
We're quibbling over two degrees off course.
"Straight sailing" is a crooked colloquialism anyway.
Quit crying criminal.

The Prophet speaks...
Fact.
Can I listen through my tunnel vision? It blurs...
Fiction.

So I resign to change.
So I resign to change.

Still afraid of myself, my potential for pain.
Not mine, but theirs... their wealth, their health.
My pride must reside on the shelf.




If you missed Rick's talk from his David series, check it out here (April 27). But listen with caution; it's dangerous.
Sidenote: I was listening to The Doves while I wrote this, and while I didn't necessarily plan this while I wrote it, I was messing around, deciding to exercise my creative juices, and it synced eerily with "Firesuite" from the Lost Souls album, so I recorded it. Enjoy.

The Medium is the Message

A crazy guy once said, "the Medium is the Message." I never understood that until Shane Hipps preached a sermon about it out at Mars Hill Bible Church last Sunday. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

Shane Hipps was an advertiser for Porsche and now is a Mennonite Pastor. He talks about how the Medium of a message is intimately connected to the Message itself and if the medium changes the message changes. He showed how Jesus recognized this. This is a concept I had to chew on for a while but it is extremely important for artists to have thought through.

What does my medium communicate? God chose a burning bush, stone tablets, Bahlem's ass. What does a burning bush say? Maybe, "I can't be contained." What do stone tablet's communicate? Maybe, "this is serious?" And Jesus was God's word become flesh. Jesus was the perfect Medium to communicate God's message. What does this communicate about God?

We all use different mediums to communicate all the time. It would be good to think about what our medium is communicating since that message is more powerful and sustaining then anything our medium carries.

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Jon Collins uses the medium of video to squeak out a living and is blogging at www.jonpdx.com