GMA Week

It’s Gospel Music Week in Nashville; a strange and surreal time where God’s glory crashes into the RawkStah Lifestyle. The result is a mess. It’s all cool hair, crosses, and cleavage. Guys in make up and capri pants. Girls with zebra hair flashing as much sex as Spirit. I don’t really know who I am in this environment. I was just on the street talking to Julie and Libby, friends from a radio station in New Orleans. In the middle of our conversation I was “good-gamed” by a friend from the band Addison Road. I laughed, waved, made some goofy comment and then continued the conversation with the Lifesongs crew. Then Mark Hall, the lead singer for Casting Crowns walked passed us. He made eye contact with me and I instinctively said, “Hey Mark.” He nodded and just kept moving. Mark looked just as familiar to me as Julie, Libby, and the guys from Addison Road. The difference is, Mark has no idea who I am. We’ve never met. Never shared youth pastor stories over a cup of coffee or written songs together for their new record or mine. He is familiar to me NOT because we have ever shared a conversation but because I have heard his songs, had conversations ABOUT him, seen him perform, seen his face four stories high on a video screen. I think I know him because of some vague sense of familiarity but the test of our connection is in whether or not he knows me. Is the “knowing” mutual?

Jesus challenged our sense of knowing with these words: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord!’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but [only] the one who does the will of My Father in heaven. On that day many will say to Me, ‘Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in Your name, drive out demons in Your name, and do many miracles in Your name?’ Then I will announce to them, ‘I never knew you!” Matthew 7:21-23 (HCSB)

This week it seems inevitable that we will all stay right at the surface with each other. I am trying to take interviews to some deeper place. I am trying to express genuine interest in the people interviewing me, not as a way of selling records, but because I am trying desperately to keep my eyes above this rock star mess. Flat-iron less. Love more! I am trying to express care for people, to enter their world. I am trying to find some security and self-worth, some sense of my enoughness outside of this Christian media machine. I am learning to find my legitimacy in knowing Jesus and more importantly in being known by Him. To love and be loved. To know and be known. To walk in the ways of Jesus with these brief moments I am given.