Thoughts on Worship

Right now, I should be working on a story. I wrote the prologue this January, and now that I have a group for class counting on me, I need to get two more chapters finished. This shouldn't be too hard, but I'm struggling with what I want to happen combined with what works well.

So, to clear my head and get my writing mechanisms working, I want to write about something I've had problems with for a long time: worship.

I've always gone to pretty conservative churches, and as far as church music goes my family takes a conservative stance. Consequently, I have a hard time thinking of what is basically pop music in church as worship. Taylor plays lots of popular Christian music in chapel, and I've come to enjoy it for what it is: a large body of young Christians singing Christian music. Most of the songs I would consider very worshipful. My transition here was difficult, though.

I love to sing, and I'm pretty good at it. However, I'm used to singing in choirs. I'm also analytical and critical, which means that if one of the really off-key people happens to be standing behind me during chapel, I get very irritated and soon find myself in an attitude definitely not conducive to worship. I'm learning to get over this.

Today in chapel we had lots of prospective students, so chapel was all about Taylor Youth Conference this April. They opened with a Relient K song. I bristled.

And I really like Relient K -- but not in church. To me, there is a definite difference between Christian pop music and worship music. If we started singing Jesus Take the Wheel in church, I would leave, nice though it is to belt in the car. I doubt that lots of churches do this, but sometimes I think we're not that far off.

I strongly feel that the church doesn't need to advertise with music. We should not try to get people to like us because our music is just like the stuff everybody listens to. That's not how the church is supposed to be. But if any work can be an act of worship, which is also something I believe, what's the difference?

People doing what they are meant to do is glorifying to God. But does this mean that poorly-written, watered-down rock music is okay for a church setting of worship? Or am I just being a snob because I think "let love explode" is a terrible lyric? (I also really dislike the song How He Loves... poorly thought out word choice for the sake of being "poetic" and too much repetition for me.) Am I biased simply because I love the old hymns?

To use Christianese, it's a stumbling block for some people, me included.

Right now, I'm working at the front desk of my dorm. On the other side of the room, about ten people are gathered, sharing prayer requests and singing. There are two guitars and a variety of voices, some beautiful and some less than so. But they are indeed making a joyful noise. Every week, we sing many different songs. I like some more than others, but when I sing with these people, I do so with a worshipful heart.

It's one of the reasons I love my dorm. I'm thankful God has given me these nights of hall worship to look forward to. I think it's helping me approach corporate worship with a better heart. Will I ever reach conclusive answers? I don't know. But I'm learning much more about it here than I would have back home.

How do you approach worship?

Happy Birthday - Ocarina

In need of a post, I decided to make a (very) quick ocarina vid. My cousin got me this one for Christmas. It's a Songbird pendant ocarina in F, and yes, it's shaped like a strawberry.

Nothing fancy, and the fingerings came with the ocarina itself. It was nice to have some early morning ocarina practice.

I think it's going to be a wonderful birthday.

Letter Writing

I have one longstanding pen pal and a few other people to whom I write letters on a semi-regular basis. Recently, though, I haven't written many. It's easy to let the time-consuming act of handwriting a note, stamping it, and mailing it be overtaken by such shiny things as Twitter and Facebook, not to mention soulless email.

A while ago, Hugo award-winning author Mary Robinette Kowal decided to rebel against the sad state of our communication and issued the Month of Letters challenge.  The idea is to send something through the mail every day the post operates. This February, that's 24 days. I'm only three mailed items in, but I'm already enjoying getting back into letter writing. Maybe my recipients don't, though.

 Handwriting issues aside, there's something very comforting about sending and receiving mail. It means that someone took special care to get something to you. It means that you've received something tangible, something you can keep with you. For me, it's a way to put a little more writing in my life -- and in the lives of others as well.

Top Ten Interesting Things I've Learned

This is a post I meant to write a long time ago, right when first semester classes let out. Now I'm back at Taylor and very excited about it. Before I start my first full week of class (I had class today, but hey, it's a Tuesday) I want to put up a list of the most interesting things I learned last semester, in class and out. Perhaps you already knew these random facts, or maybe they don't seem so remarkable. In any case, they stuck out to me. In no particular order:

• Drinking milk or eating dairy products before singing doesn't actually do anything to your voice. This should have been obvious to me because the windpipe and esophagus are two different things. I've been told the milk makes mucus, but I've never really observed that milk has any effect on my singing voice, and one of the music professors told me this. I'm going to believe her so I can have my milk and sing, too.
• Having lots of time does not necessarily facilitate getting lots of things done. This is a widely-observed phenomenon among people who do NaNoWriMo.
• Contrariwise, having very little time makes you an extremely productive person. (It works for me, anyway. I need to keep busy if I'm actually going to finish revising my novel!)
• The Golden rectangle is everywhere, and it’s really fun to hunt for it. (Thank you, math class!)
• Fibonacci in general – awesome. If you know nothing about Fibonacci numbers, I hope you cover it in class at some point or do some research on your own. Start with Vi Hart's videos, if you like.
• How to use power saws. This I learned from theatre set building, and I think it will be very useful later in life. Perhaps it would be more useful to be able to handle a drill properly, but I'm still really bad at that.
• Satan and Lucifer weren't originally proper nouns.They're Hebrew words to which we've attached specific people, in this case the same specific person.
• How to use databases. This is an important research skill I'm still surprised I didn't learn in high school. Thank goodness for friendly librarians.
• How to use Photoshop. Part of me thinks this is kind of cheating to put it on this list, but as a person who likes art, I think this is also really useful.
• "Internet" is a proper noun and should be capitalized. For some reason, this really took me by surprise. Again, perhaps this should have been obvious, but I find it interesting that in our very Internet-oriented society, spelling and punctuation are dropped for lots of day-to-day communication to the point of ignoring the medium we're using. Or maybe it's more that the Internet is such a part of our lives that we take it for granted.

I want a better list next semester, so I need to kick learning into high gear. Perhaps I should start by sleeping for my first ever 8:00 a.m. college class tomorrow.

Thoughts on Moving

For many and varied reasons, my family has moved a lot. I remember living in eight different houses, and there were a couple more when I was little. Most of it was for financial reasons, including this upcoming move, but now there is another, more hopeful reason.

We love this house.

Well, actually, we've spent the last couple weeks ripping out old nasty carpet and old nasty plaster and drywall and flooring so we don't have to do it once we move in. It's a big old farmhouse, the kind that is white and square with a porch. We still need to finish the bathroom -- drywall, pipes, tile, the works -- before we can get in. And we want to be in at the end of this week, which is when I go back to Taylor. As in many things this year, I feel unprepared. Unlike some other changes, though, I'm not panicked. Before we're fully moved in, I'll be two states away again, but this new house holds something for me: the promise of a home.

Because we've moved so much, I've adjusted to living in different houses pretty quickly. But home has some different, more comforting connotations. Any house can become home, but I've loved some homes more than others. I lived in Wyoming for two years, and it never really felt like home. However, Taylor University felt like home very quickly. Wyoming for me was not a peaceful environment. Going to college wasn't exactly peaceful, but I settled in right away because there are so many great people and things I love there.

Especially for my mom and me, this house is full of things we love and has potential for even more. It has a two-story screened-in porch -- we just have to replace a lot of windows. It has room for pasture -- we just have to put up the fence. There are all sorts of trees for a rope swing -- we just have to tie it up. It has sturdy old wooden floors -- we just have to refinish them. And I'm already planning what flowers I'm going to plant this summer.

For some of the reasons I gave earlier, I also feel like I've never really had a home church. Maybe houses would have felt more like home if we had one. Maybe one reason Taylor feels like home is that I like my church out there. Our current Iowa church is a good one, but no one from my high school went there, so I didn't make any close friends. But this past weekend, I was overwhelmed by the dedication of this church. About twenty people came to help tear down plaster, clean, and get junk out of the house. For their care for us, I am very grateful. They helped encourage my family. They helped make my home.

I'm eager to go back to Taylor, but I'm also eager to get back home in the summer so I can help my family fix up our dreamhouse. I finally feel like it's the place we're supposed to be. I finally feel like God's bringing us to a permanent home.

And how lovely is it to think that this home is the predecessor of a better one in Heaven?

Being Home

Since January started, I've been home alone for most of the day. I thought this was a perfect time to get things done. Perhaps it is, but I'm having a hard time making it so. I've met my deadlines for working on my story (barely), but I've had a hard time moving forward. I've got the basic structure figured out, and I've written my prologue. And other than that...

Winter has arrived in Iowa, and the cold has slowed me down. I have a paper route, and it's harder to get up to deliver papers in the morning knowing how cold it's going to be. Also, my family is moving soon, to a nearby farmhouse which needs a lot of work. We've started on that, and at times it feels great and at times it's very stressful, like moving in general. That may be part of the reason I'm feeling so unfocused. We're working on the house -- pulling down plaster, cleaning, and yanking up hundreds of staples from wooden floors -- and that feels like it should be a priority.

I think the other reason is that I don't have to discipline myself at all, like at school. At school I have a schedule from which I can't deviate, and it makes me get up on time and be in certain places because other people are counting on me. I can get things done simply because I want to get them done, but it's difficult unless it's something I'm really excited about. Now, lying at home, waiting for family members to get home so we can work on the house, it's hard to get excited about anything.

I think I'll be able to start being productive again at school. I'll be busy, so the time I'll have to work on my story will be the only time I have, so I will work on it. But now, I have lots of time. I'm pulled to do many things -- work on various crafting projects. Draw. Naaaap. Bake. All of these are things I enjoy. But I can't settle to any of them. Or, I could, but I'm not so decided as to know I should be working on any one thing.

I'm not terribly comfortable being so lazy. Maybe I should go bake stuff. That might make me feel better.

Outlining... sort of

After resolving to outline my story, I decided it was time to do some research and reviewing.

I turned to one of my favorite writing resources -- Writing Excuses. It's a fifteen-minute (or eighteen-minute... or twenty-minute) podcast by writers Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler, the guy behind my favorite webcomic, Schlock Mercenary. Each 'cast focuses on some aspect of story writing. I picked out some helpful episodes and got to listening. I also perused Dan Well's blog, because I remembered there had once been something on there about plot structure.

That led me to a really cool series of videos from a presentation he did on the structuring system he uses. So far, this has been my most helpful tool. Now I have beginnings and endings and midpoints and plot turns for the major character's arcs and the biggest plotline of the story. So, basically, an outline.

The reason I dislike outlines is from some unsubstantiated-but-still-strong belief that as a creative person, I don't need an outline. Obviously my thoughts and ideas are much too free and can't be constrained by such a rigid system.

This is stupid because I've never really used an outline before.

And I still don't think I can do a precise outline like other writers do -- chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene organization. Once I get to the point where I can picture it like that, I don't think I'll need an outline anymore. But right now I have a framework on which I hope I can start building my story.

But that's not the same thing as starting.