Let me start this blog by saying that the music of Amy Grant doesn’t often get me excited.
One Christmas when I was seven or eight, my older sister got an Amy Grant cassette, and I got a Sandi Patty tape.
I thought she got the raw end of the deal.
So on Thursday morning, when Mom pulled out an accompaniment track for Amy Grant’s “Better Than a Hallelujah” to practice on the way to the pharmacy before we took James in for some testing at the hospital, I went straight for my I-Pod to not have to listen to it.
God had other plans, because the battery on my I-Pod was nearly dead (I’d told myself to put it on the charger before I went to bed the night before, but clearly that didn’t happen).
So I listened.
The lyrics to the chorus stopped me in my tracks.
We pour out our miseries
God just hears a melody
Beautiful, the mess we are
The honest cries of breaking hearts
Are better than a hallelujah
It’s easy to sit in church on Sunday mornings, to think that all God wants to hear is the fake worship we force past our lips, the lukewarm prayers at the end of Sunday School…
When that is so far away from the truth.
He wants us to be free, to be honest enough to let our guard down and lay out the ugly and miserable festering inside of us before Him.
He’s seen both the best and the worst in humanity, so nothing is going to surprise Him.
Like an artist who works with materials others have relegated to the trash heap, God WANTS to take our junk and use it to make a breath-taking masterpiece.
Is it counterintuitive? Yes.
We live in a world where we’re expected to always be at our best, and brightest, where letting our guard down is never an option, and weakness of any kind is used to bring us down.
When the ones who were made in God’s image are the ones plunging the knives into our backs, it’s easy to question whether we should trust Him at all.
What is difficult is remembering that people weren’t made to be like that, and the mess came from our own choices-
Because God, being the perfect gentleman He is, gave us the gift of choice.
And choice is what it comes down to – do we get honest with God and see the beauty He sees in our mess, and are we willing to do it day by day/hour by hour/minute by minute?
Or do we sit in the pew week after week, pretending the little we’re willing to offer for those few hours is enough?
P.S. – Here’s a video with the above mentioned Amy Grant song for those of you who might be interested
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