Thursday, October 16, 2008

Music Association (Or Why I can't listen to MWS Worship)

I've been contemplating over the past several weeks as I've gotten involved in a worship/praise music team at my church why it is that I can't listen to or sing some music without remembering specific events or locations where these songs were sung. In some cases, the associations I have made with some songs are so strongly negative that I began to wonder why this was. Specifically, the dulcet tones of Michael W. Smith's first Worship disc really just get under my skin and rile me. And then I remembered why this was. One summer, while working in a Christian bookstore, I decided to attempt to read Atlas Shrugged to apply for an essay contest/scholarship that the Ayn Rand Foundation puts on every year. Most of the time that I was reading this book, the Worship disc was playing in the background. To this day, I have vivid visual memories of scenes from this book flash back when I hear tracks from this album. Not being one who resonates well with Ayn Rand, these memories aren't always welcome.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has these cross bred memory associations. Or am I?

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Naming A Blog

How do you choose a name for a blog? So many words in so many languages and yet no single word or group of words really get at what I may write here.

I have yet to decide what I will do with this. I've tried to start blogs before and they died out long before the second or even first post.

About the name: I've been developing a social network that has gone beyond my wildest dreams and I'll be sharing stories from this network here. The more I reach out into and past my network, the more I realize that there are very few limits to what a mobilized body of Christ can really do.