IVP - Strangely Dim - What Color Is Your Experiment?

What Color Is Your Experiment?

When Dave sent around the challenge to listen to the same song for eight hours, I thought, Sure, I want to be part of the cool kids Likewise crowd. Why not? I quickly told Dave that I was in.

Then the panic set in. What could I possibly listen to all day without going insane? A quick perusal through my iTunes gave me an answer. The one album that has consistently stayed in my collection for years without growing tiresome is Rich Mullins's A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band. My favorite song from the album is "The Color Green."

Why does this album never grow old to me? Perhaps it's because Mullins was an incredible musician and a Christian writer who actually understood poetry and never used tired biblical phrases. Perhaps it's because during Rich's last two years of life, I lived thirty miles away from him on the Navajo reservation. His album sustained me through long lonely drives across the red desert, reminding me that God really was good and not abandoning me in a thirsty land.

So I expected that listening to "The Color Green" all day would be an uplifting spiritual experience. And the first couple of listens were. The song starts with a sustained note on the keyboard and Rich's voice hauntingly floating in saying:

And the moon is a sliver of silver

Like a shaving that fell on the floor of a Carpenter's shop

Every house must have its builder

And I awoke in the house of God.

From there the song builds into a jig and a dancing chorus praising God for the beauty of his creation, and asking him to "look down upon this winter wheat and be glad that you have made/ blue for the sky and the color green that fills these fields with praise." Every time I hear those phrases (and I mean every one of the 125 times I listened to them this last week), they make my heart sing and dance. I feel warmth at being in the Lord's workshop, and I see the cornfields of Indiana where Rich Mullins grew up (right next to where I live now).

However, as the day went on, I developed an incredible ability not to notice that the song was playing. At the risk of overspiritualizing, it struck me that I'm often like that in respect to my spiritual life. It's horribly easy to simply tune out the music of my Lord and go about the business of my day-to-day tasks. But the poetry of those phrases caught me periodically for just a moment and reminded me to wonder and lift up my "arms in a blessing for being born again." (Really, the lyrics are amazing.)

While I started to be barely cognizant of the song playing on my computer, I had several coworkers float in and out of my office. It seemed to be a challenging, emotional day for several of them, and I found myself offering to pray with them on the spot. That isn't something I usually do in my workday; I might say I will pray but am rarely prompted to do it immediately. I finally had to attribute it to the fact that I was being bathed in music that was causing my heart to be softened and moldable and ready to enter into the dance of the penny whistle and bodhran of "The Color Green."

Posted by Dave Zimmerman at September 4, 2008 8:34 AM