Currently Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community (Re:Lit) By Tim Chester, Steve Timmis see related

I don’t have TiVo. At the moment I don’t plan to have TiVo. Many of my friends and family do have one and love it. It allows them to record their favorite TV shows and then watch them at their convenience. The reason I don’t think I’ll get TiVo is that I really don’t have any favorite TV shows. I like the spontaneity of the remote control, starting at channel 99 and working backwards to channel 2. Seldom do I watch a whole show – too much fun to surf.

But I do believe we all come wired with some type of mental TiVo. Have you ever noticed that you can hear a song one time and then have it bouncing around your brain all week? Has to be some kind of build in TiVo – only way I can explain it. Yesterday, my son Tom and IBC’s Revolution Band led worship and one of the songs had a chorus that simply went:

Tooling down the highway today on my Harley, that song kept popping up in my brain. No matter what I was doing at the time or where I was, "Your grace is enough for me." Almost like that mental TiVo simply takes over.

This fascinates me. We sang quite a few songs yesterday and while out in my Jeep I listened to my Ipod hooked to the radio. So I did manage to fill my brain with quite a lot of music. Why this song? Why this song 24 hours later? Why this song and not one of the other songs? They were all good.

I’m forced to come up with a theory. It may be completely wrong but what good is a blog if you can’t theorize once in awhile. My theory is that we have a layered TiVo filter in our brains. One layer is personality and another layer is music preference. Still another layer is theology and the next layer is the circumstances and mood of our life at the time. There’s a layer that gives certain singers preference over other singers and a layer that even is impacted by the weather. Every once in awhile a song manages to tumble through all those layers and is put on a looping TiVo tape that begins to play in our head. I haven’t figured out what triggers it, but once it is triggered it might play for days. And you can’t stop it. And most of the time we don’t want to.

So that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.