Changing Your Tune

Before Marco Polo was a game kids played in the swimming pool, he was a man who explored the world by developing new trade routes for European interests. He brought back amazing things from Asia…things that changed everything.

One of those things was a sand flea and in it was a sickness scientist would later name Yersinia pestis. The world would call it Black Death, the Bubonic Plague. Within one hundred years of Marco Polo’s trip, over 75 million Europeans would be dead reducing the population by nearly 50%. As they piled dead bodies to burn in places like Black Heath near London, flower holding and wreath bearing funeral attendees would sometimes faint from the terrible grief of such a sight. Street children began singing the anthem of that awful time of change and we still hear it today.

Ring around the Rosies
Pocket full of Posies
ashes, ashes we all fall down.

And the Band Played On
In our own history there have many times where everything changed. Not just the slow, gradual, non-stopping change of advancement and decline. I am referring more to the difference between September 10th & September 12th 2001. You know how to fill in that terrible blank and you know how everything quickly altered.

A paradigm shift and a pendulum swing. It happens and when it does it can’t be ignored or denied. The difference between the 50’s and 60’s was a lot like that. Some kind of a radical shift in culture, economy, communication and entertainment drastically swept through our country a lot like how the plague swept through Europe. It was something you could see the effects of everywhere but couldn’t figure out what was causing it.

Songwriter Charlie Daniels once wrote, “The fifties left town on a crowded dance floor and the sixties came in with a bang and a roar.” By the end of 1959, Elvis had been drafted, Carl Perkins had broken his neck in a car crash, Jerry Lee Lewis had married his 13-year-old cousin and Buddy Holly’s broken glasses lay in field near Clear Lake Iowa.

Within five years of ’59, JFK would be dead, the Vietnam War would be underway, prayer would be taken out of schools and the Ku Klux Klan would be burning crosses on national TV.

The mess and the heartache of the sixties inspired a song writer named Don Mclean to write an anthem for those changing times. The folk-rock song “American Pie” first hit the airwaves in 1971. Eight minutes and thirty three seconds later, it was a number one hit making Mclean a millionaire over night. We have all sang the song of that generation.

So bye-bye, Miss American pie.
drove my Chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
And them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey
and rye singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die."

One Hit Wonder
We live in such a day of dramatic change. Like a dream where you try to run but cant because your feet get bogged down, a lot of us fear being able to move forward in such shifting times. The economy, housing market and general stability of all things money related, change as fast as the gas prices do at the pump these days. People wonder what will happen. People wonder how to hope.

It is my privilege to bring you the Good News. I think you are perfect for this day. God could have had you born anywhere at anytime yet He has trusted you with this time. What an Honor!

I refuse to sing, “That’ll be the day” as they did in the fifties. I wont be singing “This’ll be the day” as they did in seventies. I want to have a different song then the world around me does. You and I are not called to live powerless lives and I refuse to. I think Jesus Christ himself gives me the ability and the mandate to live in an opposite spirit than my generation lives. Call me crazy but my spirit-filled prayer for you comes brewing with anticipation for God’s goodness.

Changing Your Tune
If you’re an employer, I pray that you will be hiring while everybody is laying people off. If you’re an employee, I pray you get promoted while everybody else is looking for work.
If you have already been axed, I pray that you get noticed and the favor of the Lord causes you to have choices in where you want to work at. I think this is a year of fruit bearing. I think God has called you to joyous success in a day of miserable failure.

Don’t line up with the naysayers. Don’t partner with the enemy in what you say or how you think. This is a great day to be alive. Change your tune and put your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and have courage, have courage, Have courage!

He has given me a new song to sing,
a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see what he has done and be amazed.
They will put their trust in the LORD.

Psalms 40:3 NLT

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