God Sings

“The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing.”
Zephaniah 3:17, NIV

This little segment of ancient poetry is dense with mystical imagery. The first sentence states God’s nearness, potency, and liberation. The second sentence is a three-dimensional portrait of a shockingly good God.

Delight: There is an unshakable assurance of all-is-well in the notion that my Creator is happy with me. It forms a supremely livable world.

Quiet: I am a noisy-souled man and I live in a world of noise. Love brings peace and sorts the cacophony into intelligibility.

Music: Divine delight manifests in spontaneous melodic improvisation. Aesthetic order emerges in the sounds of everyday life. A key puzzle piece of my theology is that God sings.


Copyright Scott Burnett 2006

circus ride

The best circus rides are the ones that feel terrifyingly out of control, but are not -- the ones that have been engineered to be completely safe while simulating the sensation of impending disaster. We’ll pay good money for the thrill of careening toward annihilation, as long as the ride comes with a guarantee that all will turn out okay in the end.

Life doesn’t come with that sort of guarantee, of course. But according to Jesus, there is an Author who weaves our crazy fragments into a meaningful narrative. I need for this to be true. Daily, I re-surrender to the trueness of it.

Sometimes my world accelerates into the red zone, when my beliefs, my dreams, and my loves quake on the verge of disintegration. At those moments, I remind myself that all things fall into the hands of God -- nothing slips between those fingers, or spills over the edges. All things constellate meaningfully within the Creator’s cupped hands. And it will turn out okay in the end.