Word of the Day: Accept the Whole Body of Christ

Matthew 10:40 – He that receives you receives me, and he that receives me receives him that sent me. *God has developed certain inter-dependence throughout the Body of Christ. In other words, we have to rely on each other. You see no one person has all the anointing, all the revelation, all the gifts, or all the power.

Prayer can be rich when it's simple and spontaneous. In fact, we can pray anywhere, at any time. It doesn't require lofty language in a sacred space. All we need to do is see our ordinary moments as the perfect occasions for communicating with God, then speak from our heart.

10 Steps to Turning Your Life Around

Up is the movement and direction toward possibility--"with God nothing is impossible." Up is the movement of reaching. Up is where we're going. When you watch birds take off, they don't fly down, they fly up. They leave the ground after they've found their food. They leave the place where they have come for their nurturing and their nourishment, and then they fly up, they soar.

Moving up, you will begin to discover who you are. So make the decision right now to fly, to change your life by moving up toward God and toward moments filled with yeses and possibilities in life.

Religion

Staples Is ’Not Alone:’ God, Tweedy With Her
Gospel Legend Headed to Lollapalooza With Songs Written by Wilco Frontman

Chronicle News Services

NEW YORK--When 71-year-old gospel legend Mavis Staples hit’s the stage Friday at Lollapalooza, she won’t worry about how she’ll be received by the indie-rock fans in Chicago’s Grant Park.
Not only does she have the Lord and six decades of testifying and protesting in her righteous repertoire, this time, she has Jeff Tweedy.
The Wilco front man and fellow Chicagoan produced her new album, “You Are Not Alone,” and though he probably won’t join her onstage (she’s playing the Wilco-curated Solid Sound festival on Aug. 14 in North Adams, Mass., where a pairing is more likely), Miss Staples will perform two songs Mr. Tweedy wrote for her.
“Our music goes everywhere, and youngsters just like it,” she said during a promo stop for the album, out Sept. 14.  “I live in Chicago, so, I know what Lollapalooza is like.
“But I got to figure out what should I wear?”
Miss Staples laughed in that husky, impossibly low voice that first turned heads in 1950 when she was the 12-year-old lead vocalist for the Staple Singers, led by her late father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples.
Throughout a career that would make them a leading civil rights voice in the 1960’s and land them in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, “Pops” regularly reminded Mavis Staples and her siblings a thing or two. 
“ ‘You’re singing God’s music,’ ” Mavis Staples recalled.  “ ‘You be sincere.  What comes from the heart reaches the heart.’
“So, what ever audience it is, that’s my trump card.  I think it’s going to be a barrel of fun.”
Miss Staples said she has been thoroughly enjoying the Tweedy association since he met her backstage in 2008 at a club date in Chicago, where she was recording an album.
According to the gospel singer, Mr. Tweedy was a fan and collector of the Staple Singers music and enjoyed her 2007 Ry Cooder-produced solo album, “We’ll Never Turn Back,” which revisited civil rights anthems.
Mr. Tweedy wanted to try his luck with a still-magnetic voice that had once made Bob Dylan love-struck, inspired Martin Luther King Jr., been produced by Prince, been featured in duets with Ray Charles and George Jones, and been sampled by Ice Cube and Ludacris.
The songwriter “came to the South Side, where I live, and we talked for two hours,” Miss Staples noted.  “I let him into my life.  He let me into his life.  We talked a lot about family.
“That impressed me. That’s what ‘Pops’ had always stressed:  Family is the strongest unit in the world.”
A later meeting took place in Mr. Tweedy’s North Side neighborhood, at the Wilco Loft studio.
Miss Staples liked the vibe so much that she became the first outside act to record there.
“I felt the nice cozy home feeling,” she said.  “There was a sea of guitars….everywhere you looked.”
“I asked, ‘Tweedy, you play every one of these guitars?,’ ” the gospel singer recounted.
“He said, ‘I get around to it.’ ”
Mr. Tweedy proposed that Miss Staples record tunes by John Fogerty, Allen Toussaint, Randy Newman and others, as well as some gospel standards, a couple of tunes by “Pops” and two songs Mr. Tweedy had begun to write.
One, about keeping the faith, became the title track, while “Only the Lord Knows” “is more of a political statement,” the gospel singer said.
“The sessions started to feel like my life,” Miss Staples said.  “My life.”
A crucial slice of that life was recently honored by the Library of Congress, which added the Staple Singers’ 1968, Steve Cropper-produced debut for the Stax label, “Soul Folk in Action,” to its National Recording Registry.
The protest song, “Long Walk to D.C.” gave mass audiences a taste of things to come, when later empowerment hits like “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself” cemented their rhythm & blues/gospel crossover legacy.
Mavis Staples said many of the questions that fueled their protest songs then still prod her today.
“My biggest thing has been hatred and bigotry and equality,” the singer mused.
“Why it’s still here after all that Dr. King did, after all that marching and singing we did back then….I guess it’s gonna always be, but I can’t say that, because I never thought we’d have a Black president.
“So, there is hope.”