Thursday, March 01, 2007

When I'm at My Best/When I'm at My Worst

You need to check out a post I just read from one of the Blogs I Frequent. It's from "A Waste of Good Cyberspace" and is titled Finding My Voice.

I hope that my blogging friend won't mind that I use his post post for my own analogy. You see, I can't help but see myself in that post. I not referring to music at all. But none the less, I'm at my worst when I'm being myself and at my best when I'm trying to imitate Jesus.

The Vanishing Blogger writes that he learned to sing from listening to the radio and records (guess that kind of dates him!) and then trying to sound like the artists he was hearing. And that makes sense to me. Why wouldn't you want to sound like the artist that has an album and is on the radio? They're the ones that are famous. Some times I get a little bugged by performers that take somebody's hit song and try to personalize it by changing little things or adding their own note changes, key changes and the like. Don't they know that the song made it big because people liked it the way the original artist recorded it?

For the same reasons, I think that we should try to imitate Jesus in how we live out our lives. He lived life perfectly. We don't need to add anything or leave anything out. I know that you might be thinking that we can leave out the crucifixion part--but we really can't. That was the part that demonstrated perfect submission. His life (and death) demonstrates perfectly how we are to live. When I try do live like John, I am definitely at my worst. Maybe that's because I never learned how the live like John. It's just the way I am.

If you want to learn how to sing like a professional, take lessons, practice, and let somebody that knows how to sing like a professional teach you. Or you can let somebody else do all of the learning and practicing and then you can just imitate them. You may never be an original but people will still enjoy listening to you sing.

You may never get to be just like Jesus, either. But if you will imitate Him, I think that people would still like hanging out with you. And if you ever get to where you're able to do some of those miracles...
You'd definitely be somebody I'd like to hang out with.

John

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was hoping that someone would understand that I was writing about more than singing. I was actually obliquely commenting on the magic scene. I may have been too subtle...

And yeah, I suppose the "records" reference dates me, but getting old is better than the alternative.

No problem borrowing from my blog. You credited me, which is a good thing. I have seen complete lifts of posts from other blogs of mine with no cretiting at all, which ticks me off no end.

vb

John A Hill said...

Yeah, I caught the label for magic and theory. Whether it's singing, magic or right living, it always helps to have someone that models the behavior or art desired.

Because I like to read and because books on magic are such a great value compared to DVD's, I don't mind learning from them. But there is a lot to be said for being able to watch a performance and actually see a demonstration.

Even for a singer/writer or magician that creates his own effects, there is a lot of showmanship to be learned from watching others.