You know you’re old when you use phrases that are at least 30 years out of date. Phrases like . . . I don’t know . . . maybe, my jam? When was the last time you heard anyone listening to a good song and say, “That’s my jam”?

Now that we’ve established that I’m elderly and unhip, I’d like to tell you about an internet radio station I’ve grown to love over the last few months. It’s Classic Christian Rock Radio, playing everything all the way from the late 60s to the 90s.

I can’t tell you how many times I will hear a song that’s like a blast from my past. I may not have heard the song in years — decades even — but I immediately go back to when I first heard it and what I was thinking and feeling. Music more than any other medium has the power to do that.

Not all the music will be for everybody all the time. They play a fair amount of holy hair metal from the 80s that may or may not have aged well. But there are a lots of great songs that trigger lots of great memories for me.

Also, they’re having their annual fundraiser, so if you feel so inclined (and you like what you hear), you can donate to keep the music going. Shameless plug.

But if you grew up on Christian music like I did, check out classicchristianrock.net for a little nostalgia back to when the music didn’t suck. But that’s just my opinion. Check it out.

Yes, there really is a prayer for going to the bathroom. I suppose it seems a bit silly and childish, but when you think about it, even those embarrassing bodily functions that we try not to talk about in mixed company are gifts from God. Without these, we would die.

So many things that we take for granted are tiny blessings from God if we can only see them through the lens of gratitude. So many details that we often neglect to be thankful for wouldn’t seem so small if suddenly they were missing. Like the ability to go to the bathroom regularly.

The questions remains: if all you had left over from yesterday were those things that you were grateful for and thanked God for, what would you have left? Who would you have left? After all, sometimes what you take for granted can be taken away.

So give thanks even when you go potty.

I heard this today and my mind is still in the process of being blown by how simple yet profound this statement is:

“There are three stages to every great work of God; first, it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done” (Hudson Taylor).

I think that just about says it all.

I’ve been revisiting the wonderful world of Jan Karon and Mitford lately. Listening to the books in my car makes the commute much more bearable, especially on afternoons when the traffic is more annoying than usual.

The setting is an aging Episcopal priest who presides over a small congregation in a tiny village named Mitford. The books aren’t groundbreaking by any means, but they have a kind of charm in the way they depict small town life amidst a plethora of characters who seem like people you might have known growing up.

The main character, Father Tim, always refers to “the prayer that never fails” when difficult circumstances arise. That prayer in a nutshell is “Thy will be done.”

A prayer for God’s will to prevail is one that God can’t help but honor. It’s saying that I’m surrendering any idea or illusion of control that I might have had and surrendering the outcome completely to God. It’s saying that God can handle my problems better than I can and that He sees a bigger picture than I can see and thus has a better future in mind than I could ask for or even imagine.

That prayer can never fail. I suppose that no prayer ever truly fails, but sometimes when we pray for our outcome, we often fail to appreciate or see what God is doing when it doesn’t line up with our expectations. The failure is that we pray too small and with too much tunnel vision and don’t take into consideration God’s bigger plan not just for us but for the whole world.

So the next time you feel stuck or hopeless or helpless, it never hurts to pray that God’s will be done. You can never go wrong by asking God to have His way. It’s when God gets the most glory and you get the most blessing.

“Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His Beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose – and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin. . . . To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God” (William Temple).

I heard once that worship comes from the words “worth” and “ship.” Basically, to worship is to declare the glory and the worth of God, not just in singing on Sunday mornings, but in every avenue of life in everything we do wherever we go for as long as we live. But there’s something special that happens on Tuesdays at 7 pm at the Brentwood Baptist campus in Hudson Hall.

Kairos Eve is the night before Kairos just as Christmas Eve is the night before Christmas. It’s not really significant to the story; I just thought it sounded cool. But what happens at Kairos is very real and very significant. We teach and preach and sing and declare the whole gospel for the whole person and that Jesus is powerful enough to save anybody anywhere at any time.

You can check out past Kairos services at kairosnashville.com in either audio or video form. Or you can show up in person at 7777 Concord Road in Brentwood, Tennessee. Either way I promise that you will be blessed.

But you know that these were crafted with loving care. They weren’t mass-produced at some factory. Someone actually took the time to crochet these blankets by hand, one at a time, over long periods of time.

I’m a little bit sad that with the new age of tech and instant gratification, a lot of the old way has gone away. A lot of what I knew as a kid no longer exists. But if you can find one of these old blankets, you just about have yourself a time machine that takes you back to a simpler time. Plus, you can take a really good nap.

According to the calendar and my math skills, there are 15 days left until Easter Sunday. These days, Easter for most people means bunny rabbits and candy. But for those whose hope is not in this world, Easter means something else entirely.

Easter is a celebration of a miraculous historical event of Jesus defeating death and coming out of that tomb on a Sunday morning. Easter points to a day when all those who have hoped in Christ and in the power of His resurrection will also be raised up and see creation restores and hope made sight.

But until then we wait. We wait as those disciples waited after the tragic events of Good Friday. We wait, unsure of what to make of current events and all the chaos in the world. We also wait in a way different than those disciples because we know how their story turned out. We can read the stories in the gospels in through the lens of the resurrection and see what Jesus meant when He spoke of dying and being raised again. Those disciples didn’t have that luxury yet. They were still grieving and trying to figure out Jesus’ last words to them.

Waiting with uncertainty is uncomfortable. Not knowing what to expect makes the seconds turn to minutes, the minutes turn to hours, and the hours to days. But waiting with hope is better. It’s like watching a basketball game where you already know the final score and can endure when your team goes into a stretch where they fall behind. Waiting with hope is waiting with certainty.

As we approach another Easter, may we learn how to wait in hope, to wait in certainty, and to wait with expectancy.

Those of you with pets know how amazing it is that something so small can take up such a large part of your heart. Even though she’s been gone for nearly five years, I still miss my little Lucy and her comforting presence.

I’ve never thought of Peanut as a replacement for Lucy. There’s no replacing a cat like Lucy, both in terms of her loyalty and devotion as well as her feistiness and sometime grumpiness. Peanut doesn’t have a single mean bone in her entire feline body. She’s the epitome of gentle and calm. Yet I still miss that ol’ Lucy sometimes. It doesn’t make sense.

Grief doesn’t have to make sense. Even grief for pets. I’m here to tell you that it’s okay to be sad for those furry companions that you’ve lost and still miss. It’s okay to cry for them. I know I cried over that silly Lucy more than once.

At some point, you can still be sad but also be grateful for the time you had. You can miss that special pet but smile at the memories. And the best way to celebrate the life of a good pet is to find another — not to take the place of the one you lost but to be a place for all the love to go.

Technically, I don’t really have a bucket list since I’ve never actually committed anything in writing either by hand or by typing. I’m not really sure what I would put on an actual bucket list, but I do think I could come up with a dandy bucket list for people I want to see in concert.

Today, I came closer to checking one off of that list. I broke down and bought a ticket to see Tommy Emmanuel at the CMA Theater inside the Country Music Hall of Fame. It’s one of my favorite venues and the artist is one of the greatest living acoustic guitar players — if not THE greatest. If you’re not familiar with his abilities or output, I’d recommend going to Youtube and searching for any of the videos of him in concert. And then be prepared to pick the lower half of your jaw off the ground after. He’s that good.

That’s the good news. The bad news (if you want to call it that) is that the concert isn’t until September 24, or almost 6 full months away. Then again, it gives me something to look forward to down the road. So yay for music and yay for concerts.

I know it’s going to be a good day when I get the daily Wordle in three tries. I’d like to that I have a magical way with words, but more often, it ends up being a lucky guess.

On this one, I literally entered the first word I could think of that fit within the letters I already had. I honestly wasn’t expecting to get all the letters — one or two would have been nice. But it is a good feeling to see all the letters turning green. That never gets old.

I’m still hoping to get it in two tries. Maybe one day I’ll be fortunate enough to get it on the first try. Then I might just go out and buy a lottery ticket.