James 24:7

My interest in playing the guitar came on the heels of seeing Eddie Arnold play and sing "The Cattle Song" on TV.  I was 6 years old and lying under a chair my dad was sitting in when I saw Eddie strumming his ax and wistfully "hoo, doo, doo-ing" about his cows.  After that, I started hounding my parents for a guitar. 

My dad finally gave in and took me down to the local pawn shop.  (There were no music stores in my hometown back then.)   We ended up picking out a Harmony arch top guitar, the kind with the "f" holes in the body.   We didn't know a thing about guitars.  I guess we just bought what my dad thought he could afford.  I remember it cost him $15 and looking back now I realize that was quite a sacrifice for my parents to make in those days.

Somehow I found out how to play a couple of chords..C, F, and G as I recall.  It didn't really matter because every time I tried to play they sounded the same..."thrump, thrump, thrump."  I might just as well have been strumming a wash board.

I could not get my fingers to press the strings down hard enough.  Knowing what I know now, I suspect Dr. Manhattan could not have gotten those strings down to the fret board.  The distance between fretboard and string was the same distance you see in that painting of God and Adam by Mickey Angelo.

So there I sat, holding my Harmony wash board, straining with all my might to play a chord and all I got was the very same sound my mom was getting when she washed our socks on the scrub board.

I started crying.  

Now I would not have cried had I known anything about what I was doing or what to expect.   All I knew then was that I wanted to play the guitar like Eddie Arnold and get on TV as soon as possible.  

I remember my dad, who knew even less about the contraption than I did, suggested that I bring my left hand over the top of the fretboard, that maybe that way I could get a better grip.   Geez!  Anybody knew there wasn't but one way to play the stupid guitar and that was in an underhanded way...something I learned a lot about later on in some pretty seedy nightclubs. 

Well..I finally wrestled that sucker to the ground and have been happily picking away for the last 50 years.  

I wish I could apologize to my dad for thinking his idea was stupid.  It was only stupid insofar as the boundaries of my 7 year old knowledge base would allow.  I only knew what i had seen Eddie Arnold do..and Elvis too.  A right handed picker always played the guitar with an underhanded left hand.  Period.  End of story.  I had an Eddie Arnold paradigm and that paradigm was reinforced by every guitar player in the world.   

All God's children had an Eddie Arnold paradigm.

Our paradigms, our mental models, often conceal alternatives from us.   We see the world as we see the world and that's the way the world is. Period.  End of story.

Now our paradigms serve us well as long as they serve us...well.  However, every so often something happens or some dreamer comes along and suggests, "you know you might go over the top or come around from the side or go back to the directions or..."  We usually kill them or criticize them or snap their fool heads off.  

Many of us are in the fight of our lives economically.  Our businesses are sucking wind.  Our churches are straining to make it from one month to the next.   We think the problem is the economy...and maybe it is to a point.  However, the problem may be our paradigms. 

Take the church..which is where I find my center.  We have this paradigm that a church is only a church if... If it is in a building with a steeple, if they give you an order of worship when you walk in, if you sit and stare and the back of someone's head while folks on the stage do the heavy lifting in terms of singing, teaching, preaching and praying.

We think being a church requires a building and a paid staff and programs and curricula.  We think things should happen in a certain way at a certain time every time all the time or we aren't doing church.

We get hung up on our paradigms as the right paradigms and can't even see that not everyone in the world shares our model of church.

A while back I asked a young African church planter what the churches he planted looked like.  He stared at me for a moment- you could see the confusion in his eyes- and then he said: "It looks like a group of people in a field."

The social, economic and cultural conditions of this young man's world had not so shaped the minds of the people with whom he ministered that they believed that HAD to have X, Y, or Z to call themselves a church.

A lot of folks are wondering these days...Given the tremendous needs in the world and in our communities..heck...given the cost of doing business...given the assumptions of the New Testament...given the "what this is supposed to be about"  are there not better ways to do this?  Less expensive ways to do this?  More appropriately generous ways to do this?

Of course there is a lot of push back.  After all, everybody knows that you play the guitar in an underhanded way.  

Oh wait...I forgot...check this out.

And oh...check this out...neither one of these seem to know what they are doing.

Then ask yourself: "Are there other ways?" 

One of the young ladies in my church came in a few weeks ago sporting an abolitionist t-shirt she had gotten at school and talking excitedly about a boy in her school who spoke in assembly about slavery and human trafficking.  She talked about how much money this kid had raised and how all that money had gone to help eradicate slavery.

At the time I had just been boning up on the topic of human trafficking and slavery myself.  I was interested in what she was saying but hadn't made the connection about who it was she was talking about.

I have since learned that she was talking about Zach Hunter, a young abolitionist who began his own campaign a few years ago when he was uh...12.....yep....12. 

Zach's in the 9th grade now, is the youth spokesman for The Amazing Change Campaign, and founder of "Loose Change 2 Loosen Chains," an organization that enlists kids to raise money to help eradicate slavery and human trafficking.  

Only a few years ago, Zach struggled with anxiety attacks.  Now he travels around in his "spare time" speaking to thousands of young people about the issue of slavery. 

He's also a published author.   I read his book, Be the Change, tonight.  The book is an inspiring collection of stories about people who have made a difference in the world. It includes thought provoking questions designed to get people, young and old, thinking about how they might make a difference in the world.  As I read the book I kept thinking about how when I was 15 (oh about 41 years ago) I was trying to figure out how I could get into the Beatles...not the music- the band!

This kid is a marvel.  When I get really sick of being an adult (and believe me I'm pretty close!) I want to be just like him!  (You know us adults...we're smart enough to know that people can't do what this kid is doing.  "In the adult's mind, there are few possibilities but in a kid's mind there are many.")

If you'd like to see Zach's interview on Good Morning America...(yeah, he's done that too!) just go here and be inspired.

I recommend that all parents get Zach's book, read it with your kids and resolve to "be the change" together as a family.

Just for good measure, here's an interview with Zach from Christianity Today.