I was thinking about the introduction to Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz the other day. It’s a great book, and it’s well worth reading the whole thing, but the more I think about it, the more I think that the book is just a much longer explanation of a thought Miller puts on the very first page:
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
After that I liked jazz music.
Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself.
His point, I think, is that most of the world never really sees Christians loving Christ, loving God. (As glaringly obvious as that probably is, I just thought I’d state it anyways.) They see the church doing a lot of other things; loving ourselves, asking for money, building nice buildings (it’s okay to have a building, I’m just saying…), defending our politics… and so forth.
But none of that is likely to make people interested in God, interested in Jesus, or interested in Church. That would be like giving a speech of the complexity of Jazz, the relationship between notes, the interplay between instruments, notes, scales, and chords, and expecting the listeners to go away loving Jazz.
Just a random musing; again, a very good book. You will enjoy it.
