Speaking of radio silence...

This week Tulsa lost yet another Christian radio station. Let's review this decade so far, shall we?

2001: a new Christian Rock station turns up in place of an underappreciated and undernoticed pop/rock station. Live 101.5 is on the air for about a year and a half, and then in July of 2002 suddenly Christians all over Tulsa wake to their clock radios unexpectedly playing foul-mouthed hip-hop songs. Thanks for that, Clear Channel. I'll bet those urban beat fans were surprised one day a couple of years later when suddenly they tuned in their station to hear people speaking Spanish! Ha ha, ha!

2003: the same people who run the local Christian pop station, KXOJ, introduce The Kross, a new Christian rock station. Signal isn't that good in certain parts of town, but it gains a lot of popularity... until April of 2007, when, citing lack of advertising revenue, the station is converted to a repeater station for the programming on the mother station. Oh well... at least it wasn't Coolio this time.

2006 - A new competitor in the Christian pop market turns up. Spirit 102.3 plays the same kind of stuff as KXOJ. My family likes Spirit 102.3 better than KXOJ, but sometimes we jump back and forth a little. I have a Spirit 102.3 sticker on my car. Last Monday, suddenly Spirit 102.3 turned into a repeater for a sister station, formerly AM-only talk radio KRMG. So Cox Radio can't see their way clear to keep a Christian station on the air either, huh?

So now we're back where we were at the turn of the millennium... KXOJ or nothing. Well, not quite... we have some Air 1 stations now. They're national stations, so it's not like having a local Christian rock presence, but at least it's something. And if you're really desperate, there's that Southern Gospel station with the preachers during the day. :)

R.I.P, Spirit 102.3 and The Kross and Live 101.5 . You were on our station presets when you were with us. We hope now you're in a better place!

Breaking Radio Silence

It's been a while since I've posted... reason being, I haven't "felt like it." And it's been over a month since I've made a real post to my family blog... the one where I post about family events and stuff like that. Things like birthdays (my daughter's was five weeks ago, and my dad's was last weekend) and Christmas (it was... well, you know when it was). I've actually posted here once since I've posted there, and written about half of another post for this blog that I haven't completed yet.

I haven't "felt like" posting because, frankly, I haven't had the time to catch up on rest. Ever have a time when you feel like you haven't had a full night's sleep EVER, much less recently, and caffeine is the only thing that keeps you from falling asleep whenever you sit down? That's me right now. Part of it is probably still some post-holidays slow-down, too... you run and run, and then in January there's nowhere you need to run and you have to get back to paying your bills and the regular mundane stuff. It can be a rather uncomfortable shift of gears. Today it's 8am and I'm drinking Coca-cola, which I do not normally do this early in the day, but hopefully it will help me keep alert until lunchtime.

Feeling like this starts affecting you emotionally, too. You start wondering about things, second-guessing yourself. Did I make a mistake with the car I'm driving, with the job I'm working at, with the town I live in, with what I ate for breakfast? With my house? With my church? Should I change any of those? Those are things I would probably never question when I was my non-tired self, but at the moment some of them seem like valid questions. And I don't like to air my muddled questioning thoughts before just anyone on the Internet! (Plus, it's kind of hard to keep a thought going long enough to even complete a... hey look, a butterfly!)

But you know what? If this blog is "Christian Life With Michael" then it should be representative of the real life of a real human being Christian, and doubting yourself is sometimes part of that. So I thought I really should share a little bit of my life with you today. I know once I get a good 8-10 hours of uninterrupted sleep (hey, it could happen!) those thoughts will evaporate... I know good and well that they are magnified by what my body is feeling. Until then, maybe say a quick prayer for my weak body to become strengthened. Next time hopefully I'll have some complex profound truth from the Word to talk about. For now, staying awake is about as profound as it gets!

All Through The Year

This morning I came in early and was taking down the Christmas tree in my office, and I got to thinking about something. I remembered a song by Christian artist Terry Taylor (the evil genius behind Daniel Amos, The Swirling Eddies, and one of the evil geniuses behind The Lost Dogs) about holding on to "the season's inspiration" and letting the birth of Jesus stay part of your life 12 months out of the year and not just one. There are tons of CCM Christmas songs along those same lines. Then I realized that there are tons of non-CCM songs out there with similar themes:

Keep Christmas with you all through the year;
When Christmas is over, save some Christmas cheer.
These precious moments, hold them very dear
And keep Christmas with you
All through the year.

Okay, so that one's the Muppets, but you get my drift.

What is it about Christmas that seems to make people want to hold onto it, but they never do... so the next year there is melancholy about the Christmas they left behind and a new resolve to "hold on" to it this time?

Is it time with family?

Is it the "spirit of giving?"

Is it the chance to see Pac-Man save Santa just one more time?

Is it that we just love "Up On The Housetop" so much?

Is it Jesus?

...

(If it's Jesus, how come people who don't believe in Jesus often feel the same way?)

...?

Fearless

Last night on the news we saw a story about a young man who had just become a Christian. He was so excited about it that he started telling all of his friends. Apparently he told one of them about it one too many times; the guy was found shot to death at an apartment complex.

So my 8-year-old son was there listening to the story and I wanted to see what he thought; you have to make sure your kids aren't scared by something like that. So I asked Mikey, "What do you think of that? Is that scary, that a guy got killed for telling someone about Jesus?"

Mikey didn't hesitate, and he didn't blink an eye. With total honesty, in answer to the question "Are you scared about that?" he told me, "No, not if it's the Word of God!"

Lord, please teach me to be as fearless as Mikey!

Do Angels Sing?

A few days ago I was at choir rehearsal, practicing for the Christmas production coming up in a few weeks, and someone told me that there is nowhere in the Bible that it says that angels sing, despite Christmas carols misrepresenting this passage (which, you will notice, says the angels were praising God and saying, not singing). I immediately thought of a passage I recently read in Revelation which I knew had an awful lot of praising in it, but as it turns out, in my ESV it only mentions singing one time, although they do a lot of "saying" in that passage.

So who is singing? Well, it's "the 24 elders" who sit around God's throne, and four "living creatures." Apparently there are folks who believe the 24 elders are angels, but I don't really buy that... if they were angels, how could there be "elders"? I've never heard anything that would lead me to believe that any angels are older than any others. On the other hand, what about those creatures? The description of them in Revelation resembles descriptions in Isaiah (who specifies that he is describing seraphim, a kind of angel) and Ezekiel (who also calls them "living creatures"), but neither of those prophets exactly describes the creatures as John describes them in Revelation, so I'm not sure we can consider them seraphim, or even angels at all. It could be argued that they actually are just some very unusual creatures that live in Heaven!

So that's no good, so I asked the almighty Google for answers. Here are some scriptures that people use as proof that angels sing:

Job 38:4-7 - assuming the "sons of God" are angels, which I think is iffy given this.

Jeremiah 51:48 - assuming that angels are either in the heavens or on Earth, which seems like a fairly good bet to me.

Isaiah 49:13 also mentions "the heavens" singing.

I would consider all of these good college tries at it, but I can't see any of them as being conclusive. So are angels melodious, or tone-deaf? The Bible doesn't seem to care enough to clear it up for us. I guess we'll just have to wait and see! And while we're waiting, there are plenty of places where it encourages us to sing our praises to God!

Blogerella

I just got my confirmation email for Blogerella!

What the heck is a "Blogerella", you ask? Well, it's a new directory of blogs. When I saw that there were no other blogs yet in the "Religion - Christianity" category, I knew I had to get in on that action! What's the point? The point of Blogerella is to help people find blogs that they'll enjoy reading. How does Blogerella know what people enjoy reading? Votes!

If you could take about 30 seconds to create an account on Blogerella and vote smiley faces for any posts on this blog that you see there that you've enjoyed, I'd really appreciate it. You should be able to go directly from links at the bottom of the posts themselves straight to the voting page for that post. You don't vote for the blog as a whole; you vote for individual posts. And if we get enough votes, we go up in the standings and even more people get to see the blog!

So, get clicking! (If you came here from a different post, vote for that post... it's not really necessary to vote for this one!)

Attractive Worship

Now Muriel plays piano
Every Friday at the Hollywood
And they brought me down to see her
And they asked me if I would
Do a little number
And I sang with all my might
And she said "Tell me, are you a Christian, child?"
And I said "Ma'am, I am tonight!"

-Marc Cohn, from "Walking in Memphis"

I wonder if our worship services are sufficient to draw the lost to Christ. At my church we have a very contemporary style of worship, very upbeat, with a lot of pop and rock influences. People are welcome to raise hands, jump, dance if they want, whatever. Your church's music may be more traditional and majestic. Either way, we should be expressing something of our relationship with God in worship... either exuberance and excitement to be in God's family, or wonder at His majesty and beauty, or humbleness at his power, or thankfulness at His provision, or something along those lines. We don't worship to be seen, of course, but if someone does see us worshiping God, they should see a living testimony of our relationship with Him. It should be enough that people should want to be a part of that relationship themselves. By the time worship is over, The Lost should already be convinced that they want to be part of The Found.