This weekend, if you live anywhere near Oklahoma City or Edmond, Oklahoma, I strongly encourage you to come see the FREE and amazing musical, “One Incredible Moment.” This is a production and outreach ministry of our church, First Presbyterian of Edmond. The musical will be performed again tonight (Saturday) and Sunday nights. Yesterday’s article in the Daily Oklahoman, “First Presbyterian Church in Edmond stages Christmas musical,” gives more details and background. The program starts at 7 pm, but you’ll want to get there earlier for good seats since most of the seating is open. The address of our church is 1001 South Rankin, Edmond, Oklahoma. Two years ago our middle daughter, Sarah, and I were in the program. This year our youngest daughter, Rachel, is in OIM. It’s been a very busy rehearsal schedule this fall but the results are well worth it. Rachel is both a villager of Bethlehem and an angel in this year’s program.
Last night was my first time to see this year’s performance of “One Incredible Moment,” and it was certainly a more powerful experience for several reasons. Being in the audience again, after having been in the musical and memorizing, singing and acting in the program, was powerful. I think I was lip-syncing the entire time! The musical score is SO powerful. Living as we do surrounded by technology and the trappings of modernity, I think the reality and the truth of the Christmas story and the life of Jesus Christ can be easy to miss.
This is a recording of the “One Incredible Moment” cast singing the song, “Our Light Has Come” during our regular church service last Sunday, on December 7th. The cast was not in costume for that performance, but you will certainly be able to get a sense of the power of the music and message of OIM from this song.
While I would generally post something like this over on my Christian blog, “Eyes Right,” I’m posting it here on Speed of Creativity in the hope that at least one person who would not have otherwise gone to see “One Incredible Moment” this year will go. It is not only moving to experience this musical, it’s powerful to see the reactions of others in the audience to the words, to the song, and to the message. As hard as it is for us to understand, God did come down to earth and take human form as Jesus Christ. As we continue to witness wars in our world in Syria and Iraq involving ISIS, Ukraine, Afghanistan, witness racial strife in our own country over events like those in Ferguson, Missouri, and read reports of how United States servicemen and paid contractors tortured others in the name of defense and fighting terrorism, we need the love, peace, and power of Jesus Christ more than ever to fill our hearts as individuals and to fill the leaders of our nations.
If you can, please go see “One Incredible Moment” in Edmond, Oklahoma, tonight or tomorrow night. Whether you go or not, I pray your heart would be filled with God’s Holy Spirit and you would know His love this Christmas season. I pray for the leaders of our beleaguered and war-filled world, that rather than look to their own agendas for securing oil sales, building empires or promoting their causes through acts of terrorism, murder or torture, they would look to Christ as the model for their lives and the only actor in our universe capable of bringing about lasting peace in our fallen world filled with selfishness, suffering and strife.
May God bless you and your family this Christmas season, and may we seek times together to connect to his Son, Jesus Christ. As we read in the third chapter of the gospel of John:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.