Snapshots and Synapses

Years ago, as a freshman in high school, I landed the title role in the musical “Oliver”. I was excited about the part, but as opening night approached, my voice started to change. The shortest kid in school, I had anxiously awaited for puberty to arrive, but it came at such an inopportune time! One of my solos was a song entitled “Where is Love”, which I sung to an audience that heard one cracking note after another. On stage, I was smiling, but inside I was totally embarrassed. My response at the time was an inner vow to not sing a solo in public again, and for nearly ten years, I was silent. I didn’t think of it at the time, but “Where is Love” was really an appropriate title for the moment. In reality, love is something that we strive for, and yet despite our best efforts, we can’t always hit the right notes. Life’s twists and turns sometimes cause us to sing off pitch or to crack on the high notes so that the intended melody results in relational discord. With the painful memory ...

I did a search at biblegateway.com for the phrase: “This is the day which the LORD has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” I hear it so often in Christian circles that I expected it to be scattered throughout scripture. But unless I did something wrong in my word search, I only found it listed once: Psalm 118:24. I started searching for this phrase because I hear it frequently enough in Christian circles as an admonishment to rejoice in each and every day. But I see a lot of suffering going on around me, and I can’t honestly say I rejoice in each day. Let me give you a few sound bytes from my past week: A friend’s nephew, a young adult, is in a coma other friends of mine are close to being evicted from their home I hear a phrase repeated in the workplace “Pick your ‘O’… overtime or out-of-work!” So I did this search to get some context for what it means to rejoice and be glad in “this day”, thinking that it’s probably found in multiple places. I wanted context to underst...