Learning the Melody

I have to make a huge confession. It's kind of silly but very frustrating at times. Let me give you a little of my background. I grew up in the church, almost literally. My mom was a "PK", my parents met at Atlanta Bible College and both were active in one way or another in various church positions. So, I guess it just came natural when God put me in the same situations and called me to serve in different areas of the church. I'm not going to bore you with what I call my "Holy Resume", but, I truly feel blessed that God has allowed me to serve in the areas He called me to. Okay, so now we've laid the foundation for this epic confession of all confessions.

I have a horrible memory. I know you're thinking "big deal, so do I". Well, let's just say one of my prayers to God is to tattoo everyones name on their forehead so I don't feel like an idiot. I can know someone for years, work closely with them and for some reason cannot remember their stinking name. If you've ever been in church leadership you'll understand why this is so important. When you visit someone in the hospital, don't you think they would appreciate it if you called them by name? This bothered me so much that Christmas of 2010 Tina bought me a book to help. The books title is "Moonwalking with Einstein". It's filled with several techniques and tricks to remembering anything. The author wrote this after he won the US National Memorization Championship, I know...NERD ALERT! Only one problem, I laid it down and forgot about it, how ironic. I finally did read this a couple of months ago and it's helped. I don't have as many "hey you's" in my life anymore.

So where's this going Tony? This problem doesn't stop at names, I struggle remembering scripture too. I can get you in the neighborhood and then using my beloved concordance..."POW" there it is. One problem, who carries a bible with a concordance everywhere? Ok, I'm not going to lie, I just looked up this scripture to use here. Psalm 119:11 " I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you." Not a bad verse to remember. How will you know if you're sinning against God unless you know His word? But that's only one of the over 50,000 verses we are asked to cram into our hearts. This task would be hard for UPS, what can brown do for you?

Music has become my way of remembering God's word. I've been involved in choirs since 7th grade, that's a long time ago (I'm pretty weak in math too). Crazy thing about it, I can still remember several of the songs we sang back then. Remember the words to the song "What a Feeling" from the movie Fame? I do... I sang in a Gospel Quartet for about 9 years, all together we learned around 30 songs. If you start the track to any of those songs I'll remember 90% of the words first time through. I laugh at kids when they say, "I don't listen to the words, just the music." Yeah, right. A couple of weeks ago I listened as two young ladies in our youth group sang all the books of the bible, that was cool. Today's Christian artists have packed God's word in their lyrics. To me there's no better way to give God praise then to sing His word to Him. Pay attention to the words you sing, look them up and see God's word. Learning God's word may be as easy as, learning the melody.

I purposely didn't include alot of scripture in this post. I wanted to expose a weakness I have that you might have too. Learning and remembering and applying God's word in our lives is important to know His will for us. This really helps me, I hope it helps you too. If you're not a Jeremy Camp fan, become one. His music is loaded with God's word.


Peace...

totalheel