A Kazoo and a Hullabaloo for You

A white chair with a kazoo on it. Many white chairs with many kazoos sitting, waiting, to be blown with zeal and celebration! To delight over what has taken place and over whom is present. A noise to shout in gladness. It is rather assumptive to hope and wait expecting people to breathe a noise for us. (Except in this case, as it was for a wedding.)  But it got me thinking about how much we all innately want to be celebrated. We set up these kind of chairs with kazoos all the time.

We hope someone notices that “good” thing we did. We hope people see the treasures among the junk.  We hope they find us peculiarly interesting in the midst of being dreadfully boring. We hope they see our kindness in the midst of being frustrated.  We hope they show up for our birthday parties…..even after all these years. We hope our bosses see our potential. We hope our spouses still find us capturing. We hope our kids call when they move out. We hope people want to blow their kazoo and celebrate who we are and what we’ve done.

What if we place these kazoos on these chairs and no one picks them up? What if no one blows them obnoxiously without abandon out of sheer celebration of us? What if when it’s time to celebrate in the small moments and the big, it’s piercingly silent?

I often hear people share stories. And in sharing those stories, people often self- deprecate. “I am just your average person.” Or “I hate who I’ve become.” Or “I feel like people will reject me.” Or “My insecurities make me second guess myself all the time.” Or “When I compare myself to others, I always come up short.”  I hear these kinds of statements and I make them. It is striking how much we go around as people not only expecting other people to leave the kazoo on the chair when it comes to celebrating who we are, but we also don’t celebrate ourselves. We are living out of a deep sense of unworthiness. These words we don’t deserve:

• a hullabaloo
• merrymaking
• ceremony
• observance
• a party
• honoring
• applause
• kudos
• recognition

And yet, Scripture says the exact opposite.  Zephaniah 3:17  says:

The Lord your God is in your midst,

    a mighty one who will save;

he will rejoice over you with gladness;

    he will quiet you by his love;

he will exult over you with loud singing.

The God of the Universe, who holds the solar system in its place, the Maker of Heaven and Earth and peaches and cream, the Creator who made you and Mother Teresa, Madonna and Martin Luther King, he picks up a kazoo and blows that thing across the sky in a hullabaloo over you! Then he busts out in utter gladness exulting over you in loud singing! And I wouldn’t even be surprised if He has a horrible voice and He sings with total abandonment over you almost as if to prove a point. I don’t celebrate you because you are perfect, I celebrate you simply because I see you and I can’t help but love you. Know today, that the same God who made the mountains you see in the distance, the waters you skip rocks into, the trees that shift in shades and whose leaves dance to the ground, He picks up a kazoo for you and blows it like a crazy 5 year old!