This past fortnight the routine of our lives has given me a couple of hours alone each morning as the hubby travels to feed the dog in his mothers absence. It's a good time for reflection, for unpacking all the talk of post-modernity, missionally minded and training induced theory, finding how all these words can fit into everyday opinions and lives. It's been these times that i've put on the radio station, opened up many a file to read, produced little and pondered much.
But today I finally stopped, for I could no more take the watered down version of christianity that I was hearing, and the complex God I was grapling with. The music stopped becoming a tool to focus and just pissed me off. The song that pushed me over the edge was a song called 'Everything Glorious' by the David Crowder Band. Take the chorus;
You make everything glorious
You make everything glorious
And I am Yours
What does that make me?
While I have no gripes about the sentiment that Yahweh is truly to be glorified and that his involvement in circumstances transforms them. It's hard nosed to think that a tsunami is conferring glory or disease is glorious? If pushed they could be called amazing by their spectacle and power and movement, especially when safely observed from a distance, but glorious?
Can we really rule that everything is becoming glorious when God is present. Or if something is not moving towards 'conferring glory' then God is absent from it's midst? Can God even be absent?
As a child I confused the amazing grace of the hymn with the ballet dancers graceful movement. The secular equivent to glorious is the sportmans victory, for some this song is a clear indication of prosperity gospel... a direction I'm sure the band would be eager to distance themselves from.