Asking for Trouble

In my last post I mentioned that my new musical/devotional podcast, The Word Go Project, has been a wild ride for me, and I promised to talk about why. The short version is this: when you presume to teach people about something from the Word, you'd better be ready for the Holy Spirit to teach you, too!

The idea of The Word Go Project is that human beings need to hear things a certain number of times before they truly sink in and become parts of our psyche. How many of us can remember a song, or a musical jingle, or even a catch phrase from a TV character, years and decades later, just because we heard it over and over for a period of time? I can remember advertisements from TV that I haven't heard since my childhood. A quick Google returns wildly varying results of how many times it takes, from seven all the way up into the forties, but everyone seems to agree that the more times you hear something, the better you remember it.

Additionally, I discovered by listening back to the online versions of church services that I was actually at that the second and third times I hear the same exact message, I glean different information from it! But how many people follow the valuable practice of re-listening to the same message more than once? I'd guess the percentage is really low.

So I thought it would be a cool idea to wrap a useful message in original music, to make it more palatable to listen to more than once. And that's the genesis of The Word Go Project. Each episode is a short devotional - about ten minutes long - with three songs containing roughly the same information as the three points in the devotional. An entire episode, including the songs, rounds out to about twenty minutes, which I'm guessing is probably about the same amount of time your and my pastor preach on a Sunday morning. Hopefully people listen, and listen more than once! You can always find the latest episode at https://www.WordGoProject.com (mobile-friendly... just click the "Play" button!) and you can listen to older episodes at https://podcast.WordGoProject.com.

I decided that a great starting point for The Word Go Project would be the Fruit of the Spirit from Galatians chapter five. That gave me an instant list of nine episodes to work up without having to come up with separate ideas for each episode. What I didn't realize was that as I was working on each episode, God would start to reveal ways I needed to work on that topic myself! When I did the episode on Love, I started to see ways that I wasn't loving others the way God wants me to. When I worked on Joy, I started to feel a little down and had to reach out to God to help me out of my funk. I started to feel agitated during the time I worked on Peace, and by the time I got to Patience I started to feel like making these things was taking me FOREVER! I've heard Bible teachers say that when you teach a topic, God deals with you on that topic first - even James in the Bible warned against aspiring to teach unless you are prepared to deal with the consequences.

Well, I wasn't particularly prepared for it at first, but now that I've realized what's happening, it's a little easier to let the Holy Spirit teach me right along with my audience. Right now I'm in the middle of the next episode, "Kindness", and I'm looking for ways to be kind to the people around me. I'm generally a "nice guy" anyway, but God's kind of kindness can sometimes cost you something, and it doesn't ask for a pat on the back for it, either. So that's a challenge I'm trying to face!

Please do listen to The Word Go Project! Listen to it several times, and really let the truths from the Word soak in. Then tell your friends about it, and get them to listen as well. The episodes are literally my gift to you. I'm not getting any money for it at all - in fact, I spend my own money every month to get the episodes out there. I'm not trying to be famous or get attention; my real goal is to strengthen the Body of Christ. I hope it makes a difference in your life today!

The Word Go project

Several years ago I started to notice something about myself. I enjoyed my pastor's message on Sunday morning, but often by Sunday evening I had forgotten most of what he said! I found this upsetting. I didn't want to lose all of the great information I was hearing from my pastor on Sundays! I started listening to the recordings of past services in my church's podcast, and I started taking notes of the things that lit up inside of me when Pastor said them. I wanted to listen to the Holy Spirit speaking to me in my heart, and I write down the things that seemed important to me, important for my life.

The experience has been a great success for me! I usually come home with only three or four notes from the service, but I put them on my bedside table and review them throughout the week, trying to really take hold of what the Holy Spirit is trying to say to me. But I wondered if there might be an even better way to help others absorb the truths of the Word of God throughout the week!

Memorization is something that I have been interested in ever since the summer during my college years that I spent selling books door-to-door. They told each of us college students to memorize a whole script, many many pages, of what to say when the door opened. It's a terrific sales tool, and the bonus was that it taught me how to really commit things to memory! Putting something into your long-term memory typically doesn't just happen to you - it is something that has to be deliberately done. But there's one exception: can you think of a TV commercial jingle that you heard decades ago, but you can still sing it as though you just heard it five minutes ago? Did you grow up, as I did, in the Schoolhouse Rock generation who can still sing "I'm Just a Bill" and "Conjunction Junction"? We know those things by memory because of one thing: repetition.

I started to wonder if there was a way to make it easy for people to repeat the same information from the Bible over and over in the course of a couple of weeks, and really absorb that information from the Word of God. I knew it was going to take some music, but that was fine by me because I've been writing music for my whole life! As I thought it through, and as I listened for inspiration from the Lord, I came up with this idea: I would write a devotional, containing plenty of Scripture verses and very little editorializing, with three main points. For each of those points, I would write a song covering the same material. I might even record different versions of that song in different genres. The idea is to give people as many options for listening to the same material as possible so it doesn't get boring, doesn't get old, and it is easy to repeat over and over.

About six months ago I wrote my first version of the script. I recorded it and showed it to a couple of people, and one of my pastors gave me some terrific feedback. "This is like a college course!" he said. "This is so much information to absorb! Maybe cut it down a little?" That was great advice - my first version was VERY dense with information! I cut it down about half, And also slowed down the pace of my speech, and the result was SO much better. Then I took my three points and wrote three songs. Over the course of the next six months, I learned so much about instrumental and vocal recording and production techniques! There sure is a lot to know! In the end, I came up with three songs that I feel really good about.

And that brings us to today! Today, I am thrilled to announce that The Word Go Project is live! You can experience it yourself at WordGoProject.com. When you go to that site, preferably on a mobile device, you'll find a big old play button. You can listen the material couple of different ways, or you can even read the speech in text form, but the main thing is to hit the play button and absorb the message from the Word of God. The message that was chosen for this first episode is Love. How's that for an obvious, but really good choice? So visit WordGoProject.com, find out what this episode has to say about love, and soak it in! I hope you enjoy, and I hope it changes your life!