Could You See If You Were Going Blind? - Why Christians Need Vision.

Who else out there loves Spotify? If you haven't heard about it yet, it's like Netflix for music. I can search for a whole album, drag it into one of my many well-named playlists, and listen. And if that wasn't neat enough, I can share tracks with people, post a song on my Facebook wall, and check out what music my friends have played recently. I haven't been this excited since Audio Galaxy.

But sometimes, I don't want people to know when I listen to some tracks. Apparently, you can make some playlists private, but I haven't yet seen that completely work. More than one person has already made mention of all the Christina Aguilera I had playing despite my private setting. So instead of relying completely on Spotify for my nostalgia, I've begun to listen to the radio. Once in a while, I'll hear some 90's radio rock and momentarily fall back in love with the format.

I'm sorry if this seems like it's going nowhere, but I felt compelled to explain how it was I found myself listening to Korn.

So, I was twelve years old when Korn put out their first record. If you couple my youth with an overwhelming need for acceptance, then maybe you will see why I listened to that album when it first came out. And dang it, when I heard that opening chord in "Blind" earlier this week while driving home from work, I felt completely exposed.  I felt like the radio had pulled out the home videos so I could relive each and every awkward phase.

I made it about halfway through the song and shut it off so I could sing Elvis Costello to myself (Radio Radio, of course). But before I had quit torturing myself, I heard the tagline of the song. "I can see, I can see I'm going blind." "Now that's funny," I thought. "Are people aware when they're losing their eyesight?" And once I thought about eyesight, I thought about vision. And then came the post.

Proverbs 29:18 says, "Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, but happy is he who keeps the law." In this verse, the law, or Bible, has a link with vision. I wonder if Christians can read the Bible without seeing God's overall purpose in it and fail to see the vision He has for us. I wonder if this was the situation in Judges 21:25. "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes."

The people believed in God. They offered Him sacrifices. They had intentions to obey Him. But they were unrestrained. All of the belief and good intentions didn't stop the people from making a bizarre deal with the tribe of Benjamin. I won't get into it, but if you read that passage for yourself, just think about Seven Brides For Seven Brothers. Weird.

This has me asking myself a lot of questions. What is God's vision for my life? What is God's vision for the church? What is God doing in my city? I think I need to know the answers to these questions. I want my decisions to lead to results, and I want those results to help move myself and other people to where God wants us.