A lot of people in the Christian music sphere probably know that the David Crowder Band released the first single last week for their upcoming album. The song they released is called How He Loves. Less known among the Christian music community is that the song originally written by John Mark McMillan. The story behind the song was that a great friend to John, and fellow youth leader, prayed one morning to God and said that if it would shake the youth of the nation and start a movement, he would give his life that day. He died that night in a car wreck. The next day, this song was written. Now, this song has really built up a lot of momentum since it was written. I believe it has received the biggest boost from Kim Walker and Jesus Culture version. We even played last August at one of the Heart of Worship events at Community Covenant.

Now, the thing is that the newest version of the song, released by the David Crowder Band, changes up one of the lines of the song. The lines that originally sang, “So Heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss” got changed to “So Heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss”.

Now, copyright law allows very small, minor changes to songs so that they’ll better fit the circumstances in which the song is played. And, this is a very minor change, it’s one word during a verse. But, defining a kiss as sloppy and wet makes it seem very different than unforeseen.

In regards to this specific song, I love the original lyrics. I love the imagery of Heaven just showering love on the earth, and to me, unforeseen makes it seem like a polite peck on the cheek that people sneak in on a first date; which is not the way God feels about us. He’s absolutely crazy about us and wants us to know it! So now, my question to you is a two pronged question.

Which lyric do you like better in this specific case? (Sloppy wet, or unforeseen.)
And, are you okay with changing of lyrics of songs? (Or do you hold to the belief that it was written that way for a reason?)

I’m hoping that we can get some differences in opinion going here and that’ll lead to good discussion on the subject.

d

p.s. Here’s a video of John Mark McMillan sharing the story behind the song and then singing it.

I’ve been blogging consistently for about a year now and have moved the location around from iWeb, to Shaggy Worshiper, to dustinpetersen.com. I loved blogging under Shaggy Worshiper a lot. This place had a certain feel, a certain swagger to it that I really liked. Then I accidentally broke the site while upgrading to the latest version of WordPress last fall. After breaking my blog and losing all of the content on it, I decided to start brand new and purchased dustinpetersen.com to use. It was okay blogging over there, but it felt like something wasn’t quite right; I’m not quite sure what it was. I think that part of it was that it felt a little to “me centered” seeing as how the site was my own name and that I didn’t feel able to blog and talk about worship, and music, and God stuff the way I was able to at Shaggy Worshiper.

So!

All that to say that as of now, I’m moving the blog back over to www.shaggworshiper.com. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last month or so and it feels like this is the right thing to do. So those of you who link to, or have dustinpetersen.com in your feed reader, please change it to point to Shaggy Worshiper so you can still keep up with everything going on.

I’ve been able to import all of the content from the other site to here, so all of the videos, pictures, and posts from dustinpetersen.com can now be found here. There might be a few quirks with the imported content like links pointed in the wrong direction, but if that’s the case, let me know via comment or email and I’ll fix it asap. And like any move, it takes a few days to get everything where you want it to really feel like home, so things may change a little bit look and feel wise, but after that it should be in a pretty set.

Welcome back to Shaggy Worshiper.

d

I like country music. (I know some of you are tempted to void the rest of the post based on the previous statement, but stay with me). I was listening to the radio and a Garth Brooks song came on called Unanswered Prayers came on. It’s a song about how he meets his old high sweetheart at a football game and he thinks about his feelings for her back then and how he prayed that he would marry her, but is thankful that he didn’t marry her because he never would have met the woman he did marry. There was a segment in the song that really stuck out to me.

She was the one that I’d wanted for all times
And each night I’d spend prayin’ that God would make her mine
And if he’d only grant me this wish I wished back then
I’d never ask for anything again

I’m sure just about everyone can recall a moment when they essentially prayed, “If I get X (person/job/gift/whatever), I’ll never ask for anything again.” I can remember one very specific moment when I was fifteen when I came to God with a request like this. Now, when I think about requests like this that I’ve made and others have made, I think of how it must sadden God when we say this.

To say that if we get something, we will never bother God for anything again, I think we totally miss it. We totally miss who God is. God loves us so incredibly much and wants us to come to Him for everything.

Paul said to pray continually, and part of praying continually is asking God to do stuff. We ask God to heal, to protect, to provide.

I feel like, so far, this post isn’t written very well and I’m not sure how to rectify that, but I want to emphasize that we as Christians are called to pray continually, and pray with power and with authority. (That was a very long, maybe run on, sentence).

I am actually going to take my own advice and spend some time in prayer with our Father as soon as this post is finished.

Go. Pray. Now.

d

A couple months ago, I spent a day having a little min-retreat with God. I went and hung out all day in this mother-in-law apartment at a friend’s house and sat, worshiped, prayed, read from a book that I’ve been reading, and read in my Bible. While I was in my bible, I came a across a section that really stuck out to me and has stuck with me since that time.

I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. My brothers, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.”

Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul? I am thankful that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized into my name. – 1 Corinthians 1:10-15

I think the reason that this has stuck with me so much is because of how much I’ve been noticing division in The Church. There’s so much distrust and bad blood between churches and denominations. We fight and argue over aspects of faith and focus on ways that we can separate ourselves from each other instead of what eternally binds us together, Christ. It breaks my heart when I hear the bashing that Christians do on one another, and I pray that we would be able to come back and unite as one Church in Jesus’ name.

What scripture is kicking your butt right now?

d

Twitter, let’s be honest is really hard to keep track with as a social networking tool if you only access it through the website. If only there was a way to keep track of those whom you are actually trying to communicate and network with without being sidetracked and getting lost in all of the other tweets and tweeters that you’re following. Friends, let me introduce you to TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is an desktop application that allows you to organize your Twitter contacts into different groups and columns. You can send tweets straight from the application without having to log in or go to the Twitter website. You can even update your Facebook status and view the Facebook statuses of others all from the application. Plus, the new app for the iPhone lets you take the awesomeness of TweetDeck onto your iPhone or iPod Touch and be able to sync it to your desktop.

I really dig this application and if you’re on Twitter, you will too. Go to TweetDeck and try it out for yourself. (Now for the mandatory self-pimping of twitterness) And if you’re not on Twitter yet, go and get a Twitter account and then follow me.

d

He loves you. Never forget that.

d

It’s been almost a year since I started blogging again on one platform or another. A couple nights ago, I was looking through some of the old iWeb posts I have on my computer and found this amusing little post that I had forgotten about. This was after the third Heart of Worship toward the end of last summer. I was amused remembering what happened and then again by me trying to make it into a funny story.
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Here’s a hypothetical situation for you, the 6 people that read this, to chew on:

Say there’s a worship leader, we’ll call him Steve, and he’s the worship leader of the college age group at his church. And lets say that his group was putting on a worship event at their church in which anyone and everyone was welcome to attend. It was a big two hour event with prayer and tons of music.

During the planning of said event Dus… I mean, Steve had this hymn that he really liked, which is something because he isn’t really a “hymn guy”. Anyway he put down the hymn in the set order, we’ll just call the hymn “How Deep.” He also added the hymn because he knew that it was one of the band member’s favorite song. And knowing that, he offered to let the band member lead How Deep.

Now the week before the event How Deep was played at the evening service at Steve’s church. This was during a time of communion so Steve was having a heart-to-heart with God at the time of the song. And during the song he realized that it wasn’t the song he thought it was and that he had added the song to the set list thinking that it was a different one. We’ll call the hymn he meant to put in “Before the Throne”.

So during communion and in the mass panic in Steve’s mind as he realized that he just inserted the wrong song into the set, but didn’t want to change the order because it was pretty set, he had a little dialogue with God. This is a rough account of what went down.

Steve: Oh crap.

God: What’s up?

Steve: I added this song for the worship night thinking it was a different one!

God: Uh oh…

Steve: You’re telling me! Is there anyway you can still work your stuff and make everything turn out good?

God: I’ll see what I can do.

Steve: What does that mean?

God: …..

Steve: Hello?

God: ….

Steve: Hey, you still there?

God’s Voicemail: Hey it’s the Alpha and Omega. I’m busy at the moment but if you leave your name, location, and reason for calling I’ll be sure to get back to you soon.

Steve: That was weird.

Communion Server: Communion is over, Steve. Go sit down.

Okay, okay, so that might not have been exactly how it went down, but that’s the spark notes version of it. Long story short, the hymn that Steve accidently put in to the set actually turned out to be probably the best song of the night and it really drew people in. Steve was grateful for what God did, and immediately added the correct song, Before the Throne, to the list of songs for the next worship night.

Steve sure lucked out on that one,
Dustin

p.s. This was all hypothetical of course.

p.s.s. No seriously, it was all hypothetical.

p.s.s.s. Okay fine. I admit it, I’m Steve, and I put How Deep the Father’s Love For Us in the set list for Heart of Worship III thinking that it was actually Before the Throne of God Above. So what? Who hasn’t had an incident in which they put the wrong song in a worship set? It happens all the time I bet.
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yeah….

d

I’ve been doing this whole blogging thing for about almost a year now.

I’ve moved homes twice, first on the jump from iWeb to Wordpress.

Then, after I broke shaggyworshiper, the jump from shaggyworshiper to dustinpetersen.

For those of you who have been here since the beginning, thanks for sticking around and putting up with my ramblings.

For those of you who are new around here and maybe this is the first post you read here, I hope that you’ll find something you like here that’s work coming back for.

Here’s to making it to 250.

d

Okay, here’s what you do. Open up iTunes and go to your top twenty-five most played tab and then post the top ten most played songs on your iTunes. Don’t change anything, don’t try to play a song 12 times to get it into the top ten or to drop a song out. This is not your top ten favorite songs. You can add a disclaimer at the end if you want to. For example, “Okay, so the reason Hit Me Baby One More Time is on there is because I share this computer with my little sister and it’s her favorite song.” I’ll go first.

1. Majesty (Here I Am) – Hillsong United – More than Life
2. Came to My Rescue – Hillsong United – United We Stand
3. Til I See You – Hillsong United – Look to You
4. Take All of Me – Hillsong United – More than Life
5. All For Love – Hillsong United – Look to You
6. Always – Hillsong United – More than Life
7. More than Life – Hillsong United – More than Life
8. Awesome God – Hillsong United – Look to You
9. Sing (Your Love) – Hillsong United – More than Life
10. Consuming Fire – Hillsong United – More than Life

*I’m a little surprised by this list. Not so much the band as United is easily my favorite band, but the choice of songs. I would have thought that the songs would have mostly been from United We Stand/All of the Above rather than More than Life/Look to You. Who knew?

Okay, your turn. Post the top ten songs played in your iTunes.

d

All of these new commercials for Bing, the new search engine on the block, got me thinking about the struggle other companies are going through trying to dethrone Google. They all try to load up with words and pictures to try and keep you on the site. None of which is bad if you’re also wanting to read some headlines from the day or wanting to look at some bad internet advertisements. But if you simply want to look up if you’re spelling the word “quiche”, where do you still go?

The more they try to top it, the more they show why it’s still the king.

d