when in sodom

the preacher likened it to having a job where you had to walk down the alley late each night with the day's receipts by yourself and each night the muggers came and beat you up and took your money

then one day you got a new job where you didn't have to get beat up and there were others to protect you and take care of you and you were happy and safe

and about three months later you found yourself going down to that alley sometimes, just to look it over and see how the folks down there are getting along since you've been gone, at first just driving by, later, getting out and walking down the alley so you'd get beat up and robbed

the new testament writer describes it as a country where we are no longer citizens and where we no longer desire to live, a place we shouldn't even remember because life there was no good, and gives us the example of the old patriarchs who looked forward to their citizenship in heaven, though they didn't see the promise fulfilled they were faithful to believe in it

why do we go back to those old ways, as if we were missing something, as if they filled some hole in our lives

did you not know you were a brother and a sister in the inheritance of the son, that the father had set aside all his treasure for you

i would have burned along with the rest, i think, except that he called me and told me he loved me and then he taught me to love him as well

God sings

Yahweh has provided song and made our hearts such that they respond on what we sense as being a much deeper level than normal conversation. We assume, I think, from the complexity, the seemingly infinite complexity of the world around us, even the smallest part of the world around us, that God is pretty deep, a renaissance man, as it were, complex and complicated and nuanced and all that jazz. But listen to Beethoven or Mozart at their finest, or Metallica and Nine Inch Nails when the mood is not quite right, and the harmony speaks, or the melody tugs, or the dissonance shakes and we feel there might be more to life than this month's cable bill. He takes mathematical relationships and turns a switch in our heads and in our hearts and uses that to set us to dancing and singing and jumping and praising even when we were self-centered and sour a few moments before. God is good all the time, and I think song is one of the ways he shows it.