A Letter to TTU Students, Faculty, and Beyond...Love-it!

An interesting thought hit me today as I left chapel and sat down and read some responses to this week's events:

For four years I have listened year in and year out and heard a recurring theme resonating from the student body seeking a "revival." Anytime a piercing word came from the Chauncy (or Philips for a time :)) floor, the speaker would even utter, "I feel like God has something in the works for Temple...revival is in the making."

Well, God showed up in a big way this week...and He shook me through His servant. I feel like this week was God's answer to our prayers.

Exciting? Absolutely! What we witnessed this week was a challenge to the status quo. But what happens anytime the status quo is challenged? People question it, mostly within good reason.

I remember in the weeks before I was on my way to Temple as a freshman, I visited Toccoa Falls College. The student that showed me a tour of the campus told me something that I've never forgotten, "Be careful, because anyone going to school for ministry runs the risk of getting too comfortable." The paradox with Bible college is you get so saturated with the Word and the company of fellow believers with similar ideas, there is a risk of forming a bubble of procedures that is extra-Biblical, yet out of the motivation of being "Godly" we unconsciously make them equal to what we know about Jesus. We start making a check list of what is right or wrong. We start compartmentalizing our God in a way that we can understand His ways. Sound familiar?*

Our bubble got busted this week. Praise God.

Any status quo challenge comes packaged with a bonus of bitterness, fractionalizing, and maybe unwarranted action. What I am saying is this: Those that questioned what we have heard this week shouldn't be condemned. There shouldn't be sides picked. The temptations to let our individual convictions steer us against one another is exactly was the Adversary plans to occur. We can't let that happen.

Why? Because we would wind up right where we left off.

God has already given us our first opportunity to apply what we've learned: to Love those who are struggling with what all was taught this week. That is our prerogative in such a time where the folks at Temple are so at odds. If we are all honest with ourselves, each of us was challenged in one way or another this week, so actually, we are all in the same boat.

One thing is for sure, there is one status quo that is never shaken, and if we are all identified under His love, then we are promised to NEVER experience failure.

In love Templites,

Hoke

*See- any old Jesus movie and look for the old guys with beards walking around in black robes

Multisensory Aesthetic Experience

I love music.

When I first got a car at the glorious age of 16, my love for music was allowed to grow to new heights, thanks mostly to the lonely 30 minute drives to school every day through the countrysides of Georgia. I would utilize my pre and post school journeys as portable sessions in my studio, where I would blare whatever band moved me the most at the time.

Move. That's what music has always done to me.

Those drives that I took for 2 years of my life had such an impact on me, that I had all but decided to become a musician. I did all the things I imagine uncertain teenage aspairants of music do: I practiced and evaluated my singing (of course by myself...because no one could dare be exposed to my budding star power...), I fell in love with different music types, and I even asked for a guitar one Christmas. I think you all know where that ended up. Needless to say, I found my appreciation for music should be founded in just that: appreciation. 

Not so much performing it. Just loving it. Rolling over my soul with every ebb and flow, causing me more praise for the God that created such an experience than for the artists or the instruments themselves.

Every artist provided a different perspective. Every song told a different tale. As I drove, the landscape became one with the experience, in a unified symphony of sensory adoration for God's magnificent creation and journey that He had taken me on that day. Some days were go lucky, others were melodramatic, and a number were as sensitive as the rain. The music was my prayer. It was a plea for a better situation, it was my praise for all I have been given, and it was my passionate response towards God and His love that I was only beginning to experience. I will always have the connection to music that God gave my soul on those drives.

Music will always move me.