Music can take you to many places and down several paths.

My tastes in music have changed over the years. I was an impressionable 10 years old when The Beatles arrived in February, 1964. They did impress me….still do. No group has ever wrinkled the music scene as they did. With apologies to the two current guys who have taken names which are much too close to Jehovah and Jesus, no one has changed music as the four guys from Liverpool did.

Elvis maybe….I don’t think so.

I still recall the words to most every popular song from the 60s and 70s, some from the 80s. Many events in life are enhanced and made more colorful by the music they bring to mind. And, many times hearing a song from the past will bring the past to life.

My father once said that the music was a pathway for the lyrics to settle into the mind and heart. Thats why he warned against several songs…I discounted that then….I do not now.

Hearing music led me to take a walk in the Summer of 1969.

I was at a Church Camp with about 500 other young people. before the worship service one night a choir of high schoolers who led the singing had a rock band made up of their group, playing in the sanctuary. They played and sang Light My Fire , then started those familiar chords by Keith Richards which led into Honky Tonk Woman. Without a lot of thinking, I stood and walked out because of the oddity of that song in that place. I went and bought a Coke Float in the concession area. As I came back in front of the sanctuary, the entire audience of teenagers and their leaders were in the courtyard having walked out. One leader saw me and yelled…”There’s the guy who led the walkout”.

I did go get a Coke float, I was uncomfortable with that song preluding the worship service….. but I had not given thought to leading a small rebellion.

Music had led me to a place of unintended leadership.

I can remember listening to Walter Hawkins and The Love Center Choir and also Andre Crouch and The Disciples,in the early to mid-seventies and being drawn to the soaring soulful sounds of their choirs and their music. That was the first time I felt music lifting my heart….when I heard “Going Up Yonder” with the Hawkins Singers, their voices and the organ lifting my heart to an unfamiliar place.

A place of WORSHIP ….a place I did not really know about.

But I knew I was in a new and different place as my head would shake slowly from side to side and my eyes would close ….I knew I was in a higher place.

In the late 80s, maybe because of the condition of my heart, I began to hear music again as I had when I heard Crouch and Hawkins back in the 70s. Particular songs can take you from the position you are in to where Your Creator prefers you to be.

As I have heard certain songs and arrangements in my own Church and from places like Hillsong and Highlands and Bethel…..the music, as my father said, paved the way for effective words to touch my mind and heart.

There are moments in worship when the music separates you from the surroundings and allows you to enter a place of reverence or joy or exaltation that either comes from or leads you to a spiritual experience.

I have come to understand that in these moments my spirit is being filled in a way my flesh can never realize. For it is not earthly or sensual as some music leads to.

Personally, it leads me into The Presence of God.

It occurs in Church…it occurs in my car. There is no locational exclusivity…for the One it draws me to is not limited to any locale.

I might fail with a verbal definition to explain it….yet I know it when I feel it.

It moves the spirit and yet it does not totally ignore the flesh. If the experience leads the eyes to tear, the throat to get full and tight and the heart to seemingly rise in the chest….it is not solely spiritual.

True worship music, whether with a beat, with an anthem sounding guitar or synthesizer….or with one singular small voice….can break a bond, it can lift a heart and it can open that heart to the overwhelming Presence of The God Who created the universe….The God Who is always next to you.

True worship music of whatever kind….rowdy, four beat rhythm, soaring anthem sounding synthesizers….Carrie Jobe, Brooke Fraser, Big Daddy Weave, CJ Blount…..listened to with a heart of pursuit…. will take you to where you need no “stairway” to Heaven….your lifted heart will feel as though its there already.

Terry Bethea

It all centers around whatever is at the center or core of your existence.

Is it a center of Strength and Truth which outlasts any trend or doubt?
Is it a center of vacillation and capitulation where the latest thing becomes the main thing….
for a while.

In the “everything’s okay” culture we are in there seems to be a wave which carries whatever
tends to be the latest, whatever is “trending”, whatever is the current craving of a few…..
for which the entire populace is supposed to genuflect, bow down to and accept as a new normal.

It may have always been this way in times past….I can only speak for my time.
Gandalf said to Frodo in the initial “Lord of The Rings” segment that …..
“we have to decide what to do with the time given us”.

I think we must decide what to do with this time.
In some ways we have decided…..and it sometimes seems like abdication.

One of the saddest stories of the twentieth century was of a man ….born and in line to be King of the greatest country
in the world at that time….who abdicated his throne.
He changed his mind because of a feeling.
He never could change who he was intended to be…what his genetic make-up had him in line for.
But he changed his mind….and suffered a lesser existence for it.
Some in society said he made a brave decision for love.
Its hard to argue that without seeming coldhearted. Maybe that where much of this started.

May be that it is time to look at that wave which carries the latest “whatever”….
and say STOP.

You cannot change your gender.

What the former decathalon champion is doing….is just dressing up.
In the wrong clothes.
He has changed his mind about what he prefers to look like.
Even if he hormones it up and even if he has “it” removed…he will forever, genetically, be a male.

I have a nephew, who, when he was younger, was dressed up by his two older sisters ….
to look like them. He even put lipstick on once when no one was around…to see what it looked like.

They were children.

He was trying to fit in with his older influential sisters.
It was “dressing up”…..which is what children do.
They play.

This current exercise with the former Olympic Champion is being carried out on television in front of an viewing public….
probably doing so with their chins drawn in in skepticism and their heads going from right to left rather than up and down.
But so few of them want to allow their real thoughts to be uttered for fear of being labeled “intolerant”.

I do not know his heart…..and I will not condemn him…I am no ones judge.
There is, however,  the opportunity to view the actions of another.
And comment.

One cannot change ones gender.
Its not “trans-gender”……Its being TRANS-MINDED.

You CAN change your mind.
You can change your clothes.
You can alter your appearance.
You can put on make-up.

You cannot alter your genetic make-up.
The chromosones in your DNA, placed within you by your parents, dictate your gender.

Mr.Jenner is dressing up.
Or, as the center or core of many lives would say…he is dressing down to a lower level than he was intended.

He is not the only one doing this.

For if we vacillate and capitulate from the Intention of our lives…..we are all acting trans-minded.

Abraham did it.
David did it.
Peter did it.

I have done it.

I have “dressed-up” in clothes not intended for me.

There have been many instances in this, my time, where I have acted out, dressed-up and put on behaviors
not intended for me and made decisions affected by that wave which brings whatever seems right at the moment.

I should have told myself to STOP.

As I have grown up from being a child, I have aimed to listen to the VOICE which has been gifted within me
to be steady and strong against those waves which always come. I have heard it…….”STOP!”

I hear IT now more than ever, yet there are still times, when, if I act exclusive of that INFLUENTIAL VOICE…I fail.
Its not a lifestyle choice though.

I may stumble in something…but as understanding and wisdom are exercised, I am led back to the center of my existence.

In a very important piece of work a man named James said…..
“a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways”….he is “carried about with every wind (or wave) of doctrine”.

Mr.Jenner….. me…and whoever acts  “double-minded” is unstable in their ways.
Instability precedes breaking, failing and falling.

What is at the core of your existence?

Is it a fad or fashionable wave carrying a trend?

Or is it a Rock which has no instability, being the same yesterday, today and tomorrow,
.

With no center, with no compass… we do not know what is true.

You cannot change your gender.
You can change your mind.
You can make it up to look different and change its appearance…..

but there is no changing what is TRUE.

Terry

September, 2015