church//gym entry 18

this morning i was at spin class at the gym with the spin instructor, henry. for those of you who have never been to a spin class, it’s a stationary bike that you ride. sometimes you ride it with a lot of resistance to simulate climbing a hill. this is hard. sometimes you ride it super fast to simulate going downhill. sometimes you stand up and spin with either a lot of resistance or none at all- its all hard. henry plays music and times out the intervals with the songs. sometimes we stand or sprint during a song’s chorus, sometimes we stand or sprint for an entire song.


today, we were all spinning and sweating and henry yelled out, “ok! now we’re going to move to third position (standing up) for this entire song! here we go!” since it’s a church gym, all of the songs are worship songs. so there i was, standing up, climbing an invisible hill, waiting for this song to end. there was a verse, then a chorus, then a verse, then a chorus, then the bridge, then the chorus, and i was thinking that the songs was about to end. but no- this was a worship song! after all of those verses and choruses, there was another chorus, this one louder and faster. then another chorus, then another! each time the singer started another chorus i shouted in my brain something like “NO MORE CHORUSES! STOP THIS SONG! I HATE THIS SONG! PLEASE STOP SINGING! MY LEGS ARE FALLING OFF!”


and it got me thinking; one of the biggest complaints that seniors have about modern worship songs is that they repeat the choruses too many times! after all, hymns don’t have a lot of choruses, just verses. normally when I hear this argument, i think that these folks are too old fashioned, but today, their argument made a LOT of sense. i might just go to the 8am hymn service tomorrow just to show my support for these wise people.
God is love.
-rev-rob