Ah, the Dove awards. Wow, let me congratulate you artists for winning awards in a genre so niche that you couldn’t compete in the mainstream against real, respected musicians. Aren’t there any artists who follow Christ and can be mainstream? Is that too hard to ask?

And don’t’ get me started. Best rock song: Everything Glorious by The David Crowder Band!?! I love Crowder, but rock he is not. What a joke. The Dove Awards only goes to show you that the Christian way to fight culture is to make a culture of your own, only just less original and less talented. And by being a bad carbon copy of culture, minus the swear words, doesn’t make us different. It makes us cheesy.

So we’ve achieved being more like Wayne Newton than Jesus. Bravo to those of you who spent your hard earned cash to buy a WWJD bracelet or anything by Jeremy Camp. Let me applaud you for running the baseball diamond with Rick Warren or giving Kirk Cameron more than his five minutes of fame (really who can I thank for this!).

Why can’t we just be about doing the work of Christ on this earth, to make it a better place, to love, and to save the lost. Why do we need our own bookstores piled with idiotically trite bumper stickers and crap paintings of anything by Thomas Kincaid? Is this Christian walk? Hardly. But is this what the world sees? Absolutely. So why would anyone who’s not a believer ever want to believe if this is the lifestyle that we show them. What do they have to believe in?

Wednesday hits and here’s your mid-week pick-me-up.  So what do you need? Pure 80’s baby.

Enjoy.

http://theramblings.muxtape.com/

“I often wonder if religion is the enemy of God. It’s almost like religion is what happens when the Spirit has left the building.” - Bono

Go here for more U2 Spiritual Quotes

Any you find interesting or worthy of debate?

I hopped into our minivan the other day and U2’s How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb CD was in - yes I have a cool wife. I hadn’t listened to it in a while and it always amazes me how, over time, songs that you once over looked can speak to you with a life of their own. The last song on the CD was Yahweh. I can’t tell you exactly why, but it was moving me.

Take these shoes
Click clacking down some dead end street
Take these shoes
And make them fit
Take this shirt
Polyester white trash made in nowhere
Take this shirt
And make it clean, clean
Take this soul
Stranded in some skin and bones
Take this soul
And make it sing

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I’m waiting for the dawn

__________________

Take this city
A city should be shining on a hill
Take this city
If it be your will
What no man can own, no man can take
Take this heart
Take this heart
Take this heart
And make it break

[youtube= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRQwi06rFZU]

“No One Like You” by Crowder at the National Youth Workers Convention this year.