Indigo Day minus 3

Here's another Indigo Girl video clip of the song Perfect World....if only...



This video gave me a deep desire to learn the banjo...how fun would that be. I love the lyrics...talking about what a perfect world we live in - if - we look the other way. The irony of the statement invites us to get invovled, to participate and to live, act and speak for transformation. Whenever I listen to this - I imagine myself on a stage playing a cool electrically amplified banjo, and then the words of Romans 12:1-2 come to my mind - the climactic conclusion of the Apostle Paul's letter to the church in ancient Rome.

Here's the verse in the NRSV translation:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Even better is Eugene Peterson's translation called The Message

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

A call not to fly away, to avoid the world in a pre-millienial escapist utopian vision, but rather a kingdom of God in the grit of flesh and bones invitation to real life here now. I gotta get a banjo...