Words from WW Blog

“But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.” (Matthew 13:16-17)

In our church sanctuary, there are a couple of floor-to-ceiling columns on the side. My usual seat is on the right side, second row from the back, sitting between my wife and a 97-year-old man who goes by the name Pic. Sometimes, if I’m not pinned in, I can step to the outside of the pew as we sing a praise song or hymn.

You see, the column blocks the last couple of words on each line of the song we’re singing, which are projected on the screen in front of the sanctuary. For some of the praise songs, it’s not a problem because the lyrics are as repetitious as a “Dick, Jane, and Sally Primer Reading Book” from first grade. However, hymns, not so much! It looked like this:

Joyful, Joyful, we ad…God of glory, Lo…hearts unfold l…opening to the…Melt the cl…drive the dark…

So I find myself singing the first few words and mumbling the last few like a sixteen-year-old boy trying to ask the young lady who plays the clarinet next to him in band class to the Homecoming Dance. He gets the first few words out, and then his lack of confidence arrives on his tongue. He mumbles through, causing confusion to appear on her face.

That was me yesterday, singing with half a knowledge and humming through the “column words.” The Call to Worship was a greater challenge, with the worship leader saying a few words to lead the congregation into the next line of unfamiliarity. If my theology was formed on the basis of column-obscured biblical truth, I’d be warped in my walking with Jesus. In other words, if I only get half the message and decide to fill in the rest, like it’s a crossword puzzle, I’d be a flawed follower. Like Marcion in the second century, who rejected the Old Testament and excluded any of its references in the New Testament, his bible was very thin…and flawed.

My “column-challenged” understanding seemed like a parable Jesus might have told, explaining why some people saw but did not understand, that they only got half the story and made up the rest. That they read half of the gospel and filled in with what they thought sounded good. The trend these days seems to be to take a little bit of gospel truth, spin it around with preconceived ideas, and come up with a recipe that sounds vaguely spiritual but mostly opinionated.

We live in a time where the number of bible translations and paraphrases is more numerous than ever, and yet we are about half-a-truth proficient. The columns of our indifference and apathy have allowed us to settle on half the story. The half that isn’t gotten often makes the difference between being people of hope, faith, and grace. The half that isn’t gotten is also oftern filled in with the words of our culture, slanted and suspect.

For me, one solution is to step aside two steps, without knocking my wife or Pic over, and see the whole picture. Either that or like Mr. Frank, an elderly character in my Red Hot: New Life in Fleming novel series, who has memorized the words to all the hymns, taken them to heart, and sings with his eyes closed.

Or, I suppose, find a place that does not have a column blocking my view, where I can see the whole screen, the whole truth.

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This entry was posted on February 9, 2026 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Bible, Faith, God, Jesus, Worship

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