God Loves Durham

This past Memorial Day weekend, Michelle and I took the baby up to Durham, NC to visit my sister and her family and attend their house warming party. Saturday morning, the day before the actual shindig, my brother in-law needed my help to pick up some furniture in a town 45 minutes away, so being the helpful soul I am, I oblige and agree to drive his SUV. Now I'm one of those people who HAS to listen to music while they drive or else I'm prone to fall asleep at the wheel from boredom, ESPECIALLY cruising the windy back routes through woods and farmland. So I turn on the radio and considering the fact that I don't know the local stations, I hit "scan" just to get a musical feel of the town-Testing one station to the next, here's what I got:

College rock-talk radio-country-Christian Rock-country-country-bad hip hop-country-Christian rock-country-classic rock-R&B-country-Christian rock-Gospel-country- old school R&B-country-Christian Rock-Gospel-and you guessed it-COUNTRY.

(The word "country" starts looking funny after you type it so many times!)

Despite the fact that Durham has more country stations than I've EVER seen before, on a whim I just decide to leave it on one of the Christian rock stations. I don't listen to that genre of music at all, so I just decided to give it a try and soon realize that I'm bored after the first two songs. Then after the third song, I realized WHY I was bored- they ALL are talking about the SAME THING. I'm not a big fan of monotony, and I've been known to take differents routes to get from place to place- just because. This eclipsed all other monotonous memories to date because not only was the songwriting bad but the songs were soooooooo predictable! I knew exactly what the next guy was going to sing about before the song even started.

It got me to thinking. I'm not nearly as omniscient as God is, but if I know what the song is about, surely God knows. I mean, think about this for a second. The songs that came on had lyrics like, "You're the eternal God" and "You're the creator of the universe" and "You're my everlasting God". If I'm God, I ALREADY KNOW! If all the radio stations in Heaven only play Christian rock (because of course that's the ONLY music God, listens to), don't you think God would be sitting there with his hands on his chin sighing to himself, "I know, I know, praise me, praise me. I gave the world life, blah, blah, blah. Now can you turn on some Duke Ellington or Pink Floyd? You whiny bastards bore me!"

Sunday morning, we were on our way to take all the kids to the Life and Science Museum before the party and as we passed this church as it was emptying and Michelle jokingly says, "Hey, let's go to church instead!" which starts off a conversation with my intelligent 6year old nephew Tre. It went something like this:

Tre- "We normally go to church on Sunday"

Michelle- "Yeah. So how do you like it?"

Tre-"I don't like it because church is boring!"

Michelle- "It's boring? So how does that make you feel?"

Tre- "Well, it makes me wonder how boring God is."

Well, I guess that says it all. God isn't boring. WE ARE! But at least he has a sense of humor!