Blog

are you acting childish enough?~

I have a friend who lives in Brazil and works as a missionary saving street children from sexual exploitation. We “Skype” at least once a week and talk and pray together. This friend LOVES music and the effect that music has on the world. He LOVES the vision of Mercy Music and was very “instrumental” in the birth of our vision. I thank God for my friend.

I was in South America with this friend several years ago. We were at the top of a very tall structure in the midst of lakes and trees, overlooking God’s incredible beauty. I had my guitar and we were singing songs and all of a sudden my friend began to run around this circular “stage,” jumping and singing and laughing like a child. I was so blessed by his freedom!

I prayed with my friend today and asked God to give him a great sense of freedom in approaching life and faith like a child. We both laughed as we remembered our “mountain top” experience several years ago.

As I hung up from our chat today, I ran across this encouragement. For my “Musicianary” friends, may this encourage you to LOVE your instrument, the gift you’ve been given and to find JOY in practice as well as performance, and to SERVE the world’s suffering with the gift of music!

Work should be considered as play, not as work. Work should be considered as play, just a game. You should not be serious about it; you should be just like children playing. It is meaningless, nothing is to be achieved; just the very activity is enjoyed. You can feel the distinction if you play sometimes. When you work it is different: you are serious, burdened, responsible, worried, anxious, because the result, the end-result, is the motive. The work itself is not worth enjoying. The real thing is just in the future, in the result. In play there is no result, really. The very process is blissful. And you are not worried, it is not a serious thing. Even if you look serious, it is just pretending. In play you enjoy the very process; in work the process is not being enjoyed — the goal, the end, is important. The process has to be tolerated anyhow. It has to be done because the end has to be achieved. If you could achieve the end without this, you would drop activity and jump to the end. But in play you would not do that.The businessman is not playful.  Be more and more playful. “Waste” time in play. Even if there is no one, you can jump and dance alone in the room and be playful. Enjoy. But your mind will go on insisting, “What are you doing, wasting time? You can earn something out of this time. You can do something, and you are just jumping, singing, and dancing. What are you doing? Have you gone mad? Try it. Snatch whatsoever time you can get out of your business, and be playful. Whatsoever. You can paint, you can sing, dance, play an instrument, anything you like — but be playful. Look for no profit out of it, see no future in it, just the present. And then, then you can be playful inside also. Then you can jump on your thoughts, play with them, throw them here and there, dance with them, but not be serious about them.   Mat 18:2 NKJV – Then Jesus called a little child to Him, set him in the midst of them, Mat 18:3 NKJV – and said, “Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. Mat 18:4 NKJV – “Therefore whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Mat 18:5 NKJV – “Whoever receives one little child like this in My name receives Me.    Then Jesus called a little child to Him, set him in the midst of them and said, “Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. “Therefore whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”Whoever receives one little child like this in My name receives Me.

Mat 18:2-5

Have FUN and God bless us everyone!!

Brad