Everybody Worships

I’m not one who listens to music while I write. Several authors I know make entire playlists to inspire whatever adventures they’re penning. I’ve tried. Even the lamest elevator music distracts me. Too bad. The idea sounds so cool, doesn’t it? Surely my World War II-era stories would somehow absorb more pizzazz if “The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” or “The White Cliffs of Dover” played in the background while I write. Instead, my brain automatically goes to the song lyrics and those are the words my fingers will type. Even if I’m listening to strictly instrumental.

What I can do while listening to music, however, are tasks that don’t require much brain power. Cooking, cleaning, pulling weeds. My genre of choice is Christian contemporary or worship music as the lyrics lift my spirits in ways no other songs can. I’m learning that I can sort laundry and worship God simultaneously. Chop vegetables, wash dishes… even scrub toilets. No, it’s not the sort of concentrated worship we do corporately on Sunday mornings, but it sure helps keep life in perspective.

Case in point. I’m folding my husband’s white tee shirts and listening to the radio. CHVN is playing MercyMe’s latest release, “Who Am I to Not Worship You?” I realize I have choices. I can grumble about the task, or I can praise God for so many things. For all the people smart enough to grow and process cotton. For those who blend it with synthetics to make the perfect, washable, soft fabric. For those who sew that fabric into shirts. For money to buy those shirts. For washing machines and detergent that make washing them so easy, especially compared with my grandmother’s day. I can thank God for the availability of water to wash them in. Plumbing and sewer systems that work, and for the people who keep them working. For my body that’s capable of folding and putting them in the dresser drawers. For the dresser itself. I literally finish the task before I run out of things to thank God for.

See how that works?

The novelist David Foster Wallace, not long before his death, spoke these words to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College:

“Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

You may not think you worship anything, but that’s not possible. Whatever fills your thoughts when your mind is free to wander, whatever takes the bulk of your free time, whoever you surrender to—that is your object of worship. Often, that someone is self. Could be another person. Could be money, work, hobbies, sports, sex. We humans are experts at making gods of anything. That’s because our Creator made us to worship. He knows we need it. He knows we can’t be fully whole without it. And He knows He is the only one worthy of it.

“Who am I to not worship You?” is a really great question to ask yourself today.

 

I Can Only Imagine

Easter’s over, but no series on mortality would be complete without a few words about Heaven.

Our planet recently lost two prominent citizens. Reverend Billy Graham died on February 21, and renowned physicist Stephen Hawking on March 14. How could two such brilliant minds have held such opposing views on the afterlife? Compare these statements:

Hawking: “We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is: there is no God. No one created our universe, and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.”

Graham: “Someday you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God.”

Was one of these men completely wrong, or is the truth somewhere in the middle? How can we know? It’s been one of the top questions of humankind since our beginning. It’s the reason people are drawn to mediums who claim they communicate with the spirits of the departed. It’s what makes songs like Mercy Me's I Can Only Imagine and the movie behind it so popular. It’s why we’re so fascinated by those who’ve had near-death experiences (NDEs). We want to know. We want assurance that something better awaits us, or at least nothing far worse.

Books about people who’ve had NDEs abound, and their stories share too much in common for us to dismiss. One of the most powerful I’ve read is by Dr. Eben Alexander, a highly trained neurosurgeon who firmly believed NDEs are fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress—until he experienced one himself. For seven days, Alexander lay in a coma with the part of his brain that controls all thought and emotion shut down completely. His recovery is a medical miracle, but the real miracle lies in the journey he took during that time, through a sphere where neither time nor place mean anything.

Before he underwent his journey, Dr. Alexander could not reconcile his knowledge of neuroscience with any belief in heaven, God, or the soul. Today, he is a doctor who believes true health can be achieved only when we realize that God and the soul are real, and death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition. In his book, Proof of Heaven, he tells the story of meeting and speaking with the Divine source of the universe itself. He says it is the hardest story to tell, because our limited language has no words for what he experienced.

Delta Beach, not Heaven. Not even close.

This falls in line with the words of Jesus’ disciple, John, who received a glimpse into Heaven and recorded everything in the book of Revelation. The book is difficult to understand because it was difficult to write. We have no words.

My favorite promise of John’s, though, is from Revelation 21:4-8: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away…”

There’s more, and I hope you’ll look it up for yourself. It’s why we sing with great gusto one of my favorite songs, Come as You Are by Crowder. The best line? “Earth has no sorrow that Heaven can’t heal.”

We can only imagine.