The Busy Box

When I was very young (probably around 3), one of the things that I did that aggravated my parents (mainly my mother) was to pull all of the knobs off of the Hi-Fi set that Daddy Jim (Mom’s father) had put together for my parents. He had built the cabinetry and enclosed everything very nicely. The faceplates of the tuner and amplifier were on the lower part of the front, and the turntable was enclosed in a sliding drawer above. Since the knobs were within my reach, I often entertained myself by pulling them off (or so I am told). I assume that I also carted them around the house and left them various places.

Mom mentioned this problem to Daddy Jim and asked if he could possibly build me a busy box (with knobs that I could play with to my heart’s content while leaving the stereo alone). She was thinking something about the size of a shoe-box or a little larger that he could easily have put together with scrap wood in an hour or so. A couple of months passed by and she thought he had forgotten. Then Daddy Jim came over with “The Busy Box” (which required a truck and a man to help him lift it). It was about 3 feet square and about 2½ feet high, on casters, and built from heavy plywood with Formica for durability. On the sides were all kinds of latches and thing-a-ma-jigs to be manipulated. On the top were 2 Plexiglas windows for looking inside at the lights, buzzers, bells, and music boxes that were controlled by switches and buttons on the top. The Busy Box served me well for many years; then it was passed down to my cousin Calvin, who loved it as much as I did.

What’s the point? Mom’s request was for a small thing. What Daddy Jim did in response to her request was far beyond what she asked. It was his creation, and I honestly think that he got more joy from watching children enjoy it than the children did. Mom wanted a temporary fix for an immediate need. Daddy Jim responded with something that has lasted for years. The family still has it, and much of it still works. It was made for me, and I look forward to one day fixing it up for my grandchildren and sharing in Daddy Jim’s joy.

How often in praying do we ask God for something small when He has something much larger in mind? What could God have in mind for you? – for this group? – for this church? – for this community? Let’s pray for God to show us what He wants to do in us and through us ... and that we would sense His joy when we connect with that. It just may be something beyond our imagination that will impact generations to come. That’s enough to think about for now.

Worship Is Responding to God

We will do something a little different in worship the last Sunday in February. We’re calling it Response Sunday, not because that is the only Sunday we will respond to God, but because we want to get the message across that worship is always a response to God. We will offer multiple ways to for individuals to express that response following the shorter-than-usual sermon.

As I was thinking through some of the plans for that Sunday, a quote from Donald P. Hustad came to mind. I had the privilege of taking the last “Seminar in Historical Worship” class that Hustad taught at Southern Seminary in the late 1980s. In his book Jubilate: Church Music in the Evangelical Tradition, Hustad writes the following:

Christian worship is our affirmative response to the self-revelation of the Triune God. … In fact, worship is any and every worthy response to God.

As I was looking for that quote in my file, I found two others … both from Gary Furr, pastor of Birmingham’s Vestavia Hills Baptist Church.

The tapestry of worship is formed by the various threads of conversation that occur in interweaving fashion: God’s Word being communicated to the gathered community (both individually and corporately), worshipers responding to God under the prompting of God’s Spirit, and those same worshipers sharing with each other their understandings of their faith commitments and of the ways in which God is at work in their lives.

Christian worship is alive because, in its essence, it is a conversation between two living realities – the one true, eternal God and the body of Christ, the church. Because worship is a conversation and not a mere review of the past, it is dynamic, unpredictable, and open-ended. Who knows what might transpire on any given day when a group of believers hears and responds to the word of God!

We do not call what comes after the sermon “The Invitation” any more ... and haven't done so for years. We usually call it something along the lines of “Responding to God.” It is more than mere semantics. When God’s truth has been proclaimed, every believer within earshot should have some kind of response. Heaven forbid that we stop interacting with God’s truth and just bide our time through the end of the service.

That’s enough to think about for now.