Wearily upward

There is a worship song that was fairly popular a while ago. I'm sure it's still popular in some churches, but I don't like it as a worship song anymore. The reason being that it's not so much a worship song as a song that reminds me who I am in Christ. This isn't a bad thing at all! We need to be reminded of who we are in Christ. I just find it difficult to sing those lyrics with my eyes closed in worship, because I'm basically singing to myself. About myself. With my eyes closed... And that's become a thing in the world we are lucky to live in at the moment. It becomes all about me and my  experience and how I  perceive the world and what my  destiny is; often at a cost to others. It isn't only a so-called "worldly" thing either. This mentality has crept into the Church too. Many of the modern worship songs we sing seem to have evolved from God-centric (it's not a real word, but should help convey the message) to self-centredness. We...

I am a pretty sentimental person. Or I was, at least, before moving to the UK where there just isn't enough space in a London flat to keep all the cards, candy wrappers, ticket stubs, books, love letters, etc. that I promise myself to look at in fond remembrance of dates, birthdays and special events. And then never do. But at the moment of receiving the card, reading the letter, holding the ticket stub, I am fully convinced that I will always hold on to this, because it is special and without the keepsake, the memory might be lost. The danger is, though, that we assign value to our experiences according to the sentiment we do or do not feel towards that experience. More so, I think, in the presently growing culture of documenting everything we do on Instagram, taking selfies and leaving them in the recesses of storage space on our phones, or waiting for the Facebook reminders of what we posted today a year (or two, three, four...) ago. And though it's good to remember and us...