Hey there friend, it's Tuesday and time for Tuesday's Musical Notes!!! Today we find our mild-mannered blog attempting to answer the burning questions on everyone's minds... "Are eyebrows considered facial hair?", "When we get to go back to movie theaters, which armrest is mine?", "Do stairs go up or down?", "If a bunch of cats jump on top of each other, is it still called a dogpile?", "How far east can you go before you are heading west?", and finally "Why are Mick Jagger's lips so big?" 
Pondering these things is seemingly useless when there are musical stories to tell and comments to make about Keith Richards' hair waiting. Besides when it comes to questions like these, sometimes it seems just thinking about them can give you a headache and an exercise in futility as no matter how much you may desire the outcome...You can't always get what you want...
For the little bit of choir geek in all of us!!! - "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (album version) by The Rolling Stones from the December 5, 1969 album Let It Bleed
and
Let's go to the circus, the rock and roll circus that is: "You Can't Always Get What You Want" from December 11, 1968, Rock and Roll Circus concert (video released on October 12, 1996)
Believe it or not, the #101 ranked song on Rolling Stone's (the magazine, not the Band) 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list (Rolling Stone Magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time). peaked at #42 on Billboard's Hot 100 in 1973. Wait...what? That's right, this classic by The Rolling Stones (the Band, not the magazine, (this could get confusing...) Tuesday's Musical Notes - "Sympathy for the Devil" (The Rolling Stones)) never made the top 40 in its initial release as a b-side to "Honky Tonk Women" in 1969. It only hit the Hot 100 after London Records decided to rerelease the single 4 years later in 1973.
"You Can't Always Get What You Want" has proven so popular that The Rolling Stones have used it in almost every concert tour since its release. It also finds its way onto 8 different greatest hits compilation albums, 5 live albums, and 10 concert films. 2 different television shows have episodes named after the song (WB - Grounded for Life and One Tree Hill) and it was used by Donald Trump's campaigns in 2016 and 2020 until it was pulled due to The Rolling Stones request to cease its use through the performing rights organization BMI.
As we mentioned earlier, "You Can't Always Get What You Want" was released as the flip-side to the #1 smash "Honky Tonk Women" which finished at #4 overall for 1969 and was the last Rolling Stone's single of the decade. With its drug references and dissatisfaction bend, "You Can't Always Get What You Want" would resonate with the war-protesting music buying public as they navigated toward the new decade and realized that sometimes while standing against things in which you disagree with introspection and pondering you realize that many times you have it better than what you thought.
This displeasure was also the situation our friends the Israelites found themselves in as they continued their journey to the Promised Land. They began to voice their annoyance with their current situation and God singed the outskirts of the camp. (maybe a bit more than singed...folks got toasted!) As they traveled under God's leadership for direction, protection, and discipline they soon found themselves wishing for the good ol days of fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic (could have stopped at melons for my part) that they had in Egypt. The one thing they didn't mention in the trip down memory lane...They were SLAVES!
God was providing a Holy meal to them each day in the form of manna, a coriander seed-like substance that could be used as a bread grain for meal preparations. But this wasn't good enough. The Bible says that a few footloose men, "rabble" is what the Bible calls them, stirred the pot of discontent and got the people in an uproar about their food situation.
And I went down to the demonstration
To get my fair share of abuse
Singing, "We're gonna vent our frustration
If we don't we're gonna blow a fifty-amp fuse"Their criticism became so bad that it began to weigh on Moses. He became so distraught that he asked God,
"Why have You been so hard on Your servant? And why have I not found favor in Your sight, that You have put the burden of all this people on me? Was it I who conceived all this people? Or did I give birth to them, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your arms, as a nurse carries a nursing infant, to the land which You swore to their fathers’? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they weep before me, saying, ‘Give us meat so that we may eat!’ I am not able to carry all this people by myself, because it is too burdensome for me. So if You are going to deal with me this way, please kill me now, if I have found favor in Your sight, and do not let me see my misery.”
My confession to you this week friend is that I have felt the same way Moses did at times in my life. Why you may ask? Quite simply, I didn't get my way... There is a huge difference in the number of folks that Moses was dealing with (approximately 2.4 million) compared to the number of folks that I encounter (How Many People Does the Average Person Physically Meet in a Lifetime? - reference.com - August 12, 2020). Sure there are also differences in Moses' responsibilities and mine, but the same principles apply...you have no reason to fuss...you get what you need.
Admittedly, the lines between wants and needs can quickly become blurred. And everyone has different wants and needs. Take a moment of introspection and seek what God determines is a need versus what you determine is a want...you just might find...Then you might ask God something like this..."God, today as I pursue You, through Your mercy and grace, thwart my sin..."
God instructs Moses to delegate some of his responsibility to 70 leaders. God pours out Himself on this 70 and tells the entire nation to get ready for another miracle by consecrating (dedicate; ordain; sanctify) themselves before Him.
I firmly believe this passage in Scripture is where we get the idiom "be careful what you ask for...you just might get it" comes. The miracle that God gives the Israelites comes in the form of a massive amount of quail (3 feet deep) to go along with their manna waffles and manna bagels ("So, You Wanna Go Back To Egypt?" - the title track from the 1980 album by Keith Green) to satiate their appetite. So all is great and groovy now right??!! The problem winds up being that men live up to their nature and decide to get greedy. As they are eating, the greedy, footloose men soon found themselves on the wrong side of God. God gets so angry with them for not relying on His sufficiency, He causes them to die via plague. Umm...I'll take manna, please...I hear it makes a nice souffle...
It is so easy to be critical of the Israelites in the wilderness. However, I wonder how we respond to God's sufficiency in the wilderness' we face? Do we ever cry and whine about not getting/having something that we want? Do we ever wish for the good ol days that weren't always good? Do we ever proclaim..."I can't get no satisfaction"? (oops, sorry wrong song!) Do we long for that time when we were in slavery to the sin of the world and it seems better than our obedience to God? Are we so dissatisfied with our current condition that we are blind to the provision of our needs supplied to us by the God who knows what our true needs are? We all need a reminder that if we'll be patient and open our eyes we just might find...we get what we need. Isaiah 55 NASB/AMP/KJV
Oh yeah, Can a hairbrush actually go through Keith Richard's mane?
'Til Tuesday,
Serving HIM by serving You,
randy
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