Wednesday • 7/26/2023
This week, we are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.
“Creativity, KOA, & the Wilderness”
There’s no place for diversions and distractions when I have my creativity hat on. Well, there are exceptions—like when my wife says, “Full moon tonight. Let’s drive to the beach and take a walk!” Diversions are fun. Distractions, not so much. For me, creative moments are hard to come by, and it’s tough to overcome getting sidetracked.
Then again … diversions and distractions provide a different angle of vision. Often, it’s the odd and the unplanned that make for great stories and unanticipated insights.
KOA Diversions
Recently, Peter Furler, former frontman for the Newsboys, visited the staff of Z88.3, Orlando’s Christian FM radio station, during our weekly devotions. He reflected on life since leaving the Newsboys in 2008. He spent a lot of that time in an RV with his wife, logging some 110,000 miles, seeing the USA, spending nights in KOAs (that’s Kampgrounds of America, for non-campers). Furler talked about the way that being with a different crowd—for some reason, his celebrity had escaped the KOA community—helped him see through other people’s eyes and gave him a chance to, well, slow down.
The result? A closer marriage, a simpler lifestyle, and, in the end, a renewed sense of calling to the craft of songwriting and music-making. When he sings now it’s with a renewed sense of the power of familiar truths: “You hold the weight of the world, yet I don’t slip through your hands.”
From the Wild
It’s not just pleasant diversions that lead to creative insights. Consider David, the Bible’s best songwriter. Thirteen of David’s psalms bear superscriptions that place them in specific places in his life. Every tableau is painful, yet every psalm that results is a masterpiece.
David paid no small price for the title “Sweet Singer of Israel” (2 Samuel 23:1). If our use of the psalms—whether as the basis for songwriting, prayer-composition, personal meditation, service-design—is to be more than “cherry picking,” we have to inhabit the stories from which they emerge.
It’s when he’s hiding from Saul in a cave in a foreboding wilderness that David finds refuge in the shadow of God’s wings (Psalm 57:1; compare 1 Samuel 24:3). It’s when he’s feigning slobber-mouthed insanity among the Philistines that David discovers God has put his tears in a bottle (Psalm 56:8; compare 1 Samuel 21:11-13). It’s as a result of being “outed” about his horrible sin against Bathsheba and Uriah that David turns to the One who alone can “wash … cleanse … purge … blot out” his sins and iniquities (Psalm 51:2,8,10; compare 2 Samuel 12-13). David’s “broken and contrite heart” can indeed make God “hide his face” from David’s sins (Psalm 51:10, 18).
The Real Song
I’m sure David knew he had a gift. I can well imagine him sitting in his palace, surrounded by lots of wives, children, and advisors: “Will everyone please be quiet? Can’t you see I’m trying to write a psalm of praise to God?!” But God’s interest in David’s creativity was secondary, I think. What God wanted was David himself—his heart, his mind, his affections, his obedience. Getting David’s heart took a barren wilderness, enemies that sought his harm, a meddling prophet, difficult children. The distractions made David look fully into his Father’s face. The creativity was reflex.
When God calls us to a ministry in the arts, he seems to send us to strange places. Sometimes it’s to a KOA to make us slow down and consider another way of looking at things. Sometimes it’s into a wilderness so we can understand the desperation of our hearts, the hopelessness of life without our God. It’s in those strange places he draws from us what he seeks: our worship.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+