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.