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At The Mentoring Project, we’ve taken our donor relations to a very small level, or rather, a very intimate level. For our key donors, we are issuing an invitation to my home for a house concert. If you’re already giving more than $50 per month, make sure you are on the invite list. And if you’d like to start helping The Mentoring Project provide positive role models for kids growing up without fathers, sign up. We’d love to have you over sometime in 2011. There will be more than a few opportunities, so if you were planning a trip to the Pacific Northwest, consider planning it around one of the concerts at my house. You can learn more here.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m reading The Weight of Glory this week and was struck by Lewis’ comment that much of what we do we do to “win worship.” Much of what we tweet, blog about, write about, and say in conversation is an attempt at such. Lewis considered this an inheritance from Paganism. What is most sad about winning worship for ourselves is that any attempt at such marks a disinterest in God who is worthy of worship. I don’t say that to make us feel guilty, which doesn’t do anything to serve us in this instance, but in that freedom from self is found in love, in having found something so incredibly big and beautiful and awe-inspiring that in the face of it we are hardly self aware. Winning worship, then, is what happens when we aren’t aware of something greater than ourselves. When I attempt to “win worship” it’s because I’m not standing before anything bigger or more impressive than myself, and in fact see what’s standing in front of me as less than me, and am calling it to worship what I believe is the most impressive thing in the room, myself. It’s gloomy.

The great stumbling block of the creative mind is the awareness of self from the perspective of others. Self awareness isn’t the enemy, because we are in fact masterworks of God, but rather the overemphasis regarding what others think of us. When we think too much about the opinions of others, we are letting them edit a book God has written. In his introduction to C.S. Lewis’ sermon The Weight of Glory, Walter Hooper says Lewis was not capable of writing a great work until he converted to Christianity, not because only Christians create great work (obviously) but because his conversion marked an inner change in which he ceased to take much interest in himself. In an age in which we can project an image and score that image based on immediate Facebook and Twitter feedback, thus making a video game of life and a false-reality composed of lies, what gets lost is a joyful obsession with the work we create from the purest of motives, a sheer joy in the act of creation itself that causes us to lose ourselves in something else, and in a way die to ourselves over the absolute love of a thing we are [...]