Singing

Last weekend, Joe and I went to Glasgow for the weekend.  We were staying in a budget hotel (with bunk beds) not far from the city centre.  There was a cinema, a bowling alley, a casino and half a dozen restaurants nearby.  We were there for two nights.  The bus stop into the city centre was just a short walk away.

As we were on our way to the bus stop there was a street cleaner.  He was picking up the discarded bottles and food wrappers.  As he moved along he was singing loudly.  It was the theme tune to “Neighbours”. He wasn’t humming quietly.  He wasn’t embarrassed and he wasn’t all that tuneful – he just sang. 

 

Earlier this week someone resurrected the staff choir! It was reincarnated as just a singing group rather than a choir.  In the previous life they used to hand out music sheets and aim to hit the right notes at the right time and break out into harmonies.  I reckon that is why I stopped going.  I was very conscious that my voice was not really up to it.  I sing, but would not label myself a singer.  It has to be said that the more I sung the better the voice became – but I felt very much the worst singer in the choir!

Now we just have the words and belt out the melody. I suppose, once we get comfortable singing again the music sheets and the harmonies will show up.

One of the songs we sang was “Hallelujah” written by Leonard Cohen.  It is a song that comes with memories attached.  

We had seen the Shrek movie, the first one, and bought the soundtrack, and while we were peeling wallpaper off the wall in the spare bedroom it was constantly playing.  The wall paper came off in very small, very damp scraps and took a very long time.  Both the husband and I regretted not just painting, or papering over what was already up – but once you start these things you cannot stop until they are completed.  I seem to remember that the last strip of new paper went up on the wall five minutes before my sister was due to arrive and sleep in the room!

The other “Hallelujah” memory was more recent.  Our fellowship supports a small Sunday evening meeting for people who haven’t much experience of mainstream church environments.  They are exploring what faith in God means.  There is a meal and a very light-touch study of the scriptures. 

One Sunday evening another church in the city was hosting a café style music event.  A band played while people drank tea or coffee and chatted.  The songs were gentle background stuff on a Christian theme.  It was an excellent band with a very professional sound.  We took our small group along to give them a wider experience of what Christians were about.

Towards the end of the evening one of our ladies asked if she could make request.  She asked them to sing “Hallelujah”.  

The request didn’t go down well.  I admit that although I belted out the words as I picked off the wall paper in the spare bedroom, I hadn’t really paid that much attention the lyrics.  I joined in the hallelujahs enthusiastically and knew that David had a mention in the song somewhere.  In whispered tones, it was explained to the woman that it wasn’t an appropriate song.  It was all about sex.  Our lady didn’t quite storm off but she muttered.  Our “ladies” muttered and continued muttering in the car on the way home.  My husband also muttered – well, he didn’t really mutter at all, but he did wait until we had dropped off the ladies before he gave his view about the song.  He insisted it wasn’t all about sex.  There was a deeper level to the song.

I am not quite sure how comfortable I felt singing the song the other day.  Was it really about sex?  Should I be singing it if it was? 

The comments from a website "Song Meanings" make for interesting reading.

I might not be overly impressed with the songs we end up singing but I am impressed with the fact that I am singing!  I have always liked singing.  It seemed to me to be the perfect antidote to grumbling and complaining.  I didn’t quite realise just how good singing is.

“The health benefits of singing are both physical and psychological. Singing has physical benefits because it is an aerobic activity that increases oxygenation in the blood stream and exercises major muscle groups in the upper body, even when sitting. Singing has psychological benefits because of its normally positive effect in reducing stress levels through the action of the endocrine system which is linked to our sense of emotional well-being. Psychological benefits are also evident when people sing together as well as alone because of the increased sense of community, belonging and shared endeavour,” says Professor Graham Welch, Chair of Music Education at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Keep singing!

Reverse Truths

I have been reading through some of the early chapters of Jeremiah.  It makes for very grim reading at times.  Sadly, one can’t but help read about God’s people then and think how much of it may be true about God’s people today! Reading through chapter 6, three verses caught my eye:-

“To whom can I speak and give warning?  Who will listen to me?  Their ears are closed so they cannot hear.  The word of the Lord is offensive to them; they find no pleasure in it.” Jeremiah 6:10

“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.  But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’” Jeremiah 6:16

“Therefore this is what the Lord says: “I will put obstacles before this people. Fathers and sons alike will stumble over them; neighbours and friends will perish.”  Jeremiah 6:21

Later on in the book of Jeremiah, God tells his prophet not to pray for the people because He will not listen and will not answer.  The people have strayed so far and been so rebellious that God has disowned them.  They are no longer His people and He has withdrawn His provision and His protection.  They wanted independence – so He gave it to them.

After reading one depressing chapter after another in Jeremiah one can understand why Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet.  It is bad enough that the people of God are not living up to God’s expectations – but God disowning them is even worse.  They are on course for an invasion from the north and exile into a foreign country.

I have a thing that I do when there seems to be nothing to be encouraged by.  I turn things upside down to find the reverse truth.  The things that the people of God had been doing had caused God to disown them and create distance between them.  What must I do to create an opposite reaction from God?

When He speaks to me to give me warning I will listen to Him.  My ears will be open so that I can hear.  I will not be offended by His word but find delight in everything He says.

When I stand at the crossroads I will look; I will ask for the ancient paths, the good way, and I will walk in it.  I shall find rest for my soul. I will said, ‘I will walk in it.’

The Lord will remove the obstacles before His people. Fathers and sons alike will not stumble; neighbours and friends will flourish.

Sometimes it is the revelation of what could have been if I had walked well with God that stirs me more than someone spelling out how bad things will be because of my rebellion.

The phrase that particularly provokes my spirit is “God will remove the obstacles before His people”.  The biggest obstacle, sin, had been removed by Christ.  

I claim it as a promise that God removes the obstacles from my path when I open my ears to listen to Him, when I take delight in His word and when I walk the good path He has set me upon.

The Wake-up Call

The talk around the coffee table at work this morning was all about Andy Murray’s US Open victory.  There was some yawning and passing around of matchsticks to keep the eye lids open.  A friend of mine listened to the match on the radio.

I confess that I didn’t even make it through the first set.  Breaking serve, followed by being broken in the next game is not conducive to a feeling of peace and harmony.  I retired to bed on the pretence of reading a book, but I checked the progress of the match on the computer in the next room.

My husband was convinced that Andy Murray was going to win. He had even considered a correct score bet on the way home from work but he knew that I had views about jinxing matches.  There is a deep seated conviction that even the action of my watching a game can jinx it.  Experience shows that Andy wins matches when I don’t watch.

Before I switched off the light and snuggled down to sleep, I prayed – not for an outright win for Andy – that seems an outright misuse of the gift of prayer.  Anticipating that the match would go on well into the early hours of the morning, and knowing that I had work the next day, I prayed that God would wake me up so I could see the final game and know the score.  Some would also perceive this as an outright misuse of prayer.  There was no sense that God had heard or that He would answer. 

I fell asleep.

About two o’clock in the morning I woke up. 

The inner voice spoke, “I’ve done My part in waking you up, as you asked.  It’s up to you to get up and go down stairs to switch the TV on.”

I fell out of bed and tumbled down the stairs.  My glasses were left on the bedside cabinet.  I switched on the TV and, right enough, it looked to be the last game.  Murray was serving for the match.  Nose almost touching the screen I watched as the ball flew from one side of the court to the other and Murray notched up the points, then lost a few till, finally, he had match point.  Nose touching the screen I watched the final ball played. 

I watched the presentation and listened to all the speeches…and then I went back to bed.  I thanked God for waking me up as I had asked him to. 

Climbing back into bed, the inner voice spoke yet again.

“The power of prayer…the promise to shift mountains, to pull down strongholds, to bind the enemy and release faith into people’s lives!  I give you all that and what do you ask for?  To be woken up at two in the morning to watch the last game of the US Open?”

Some might say the inner voice was my own inner voice and that waking up at the time that I did was just coincidence.  Some would say it – but not me.

It would not have hurt me to wait until the morning to find out the result.  It’s not as if I had watched much of the game anyway.

For me it is a reminder that God cares for me.  He is not just interested in the times when I use faith to move mountains or bring strongholds crashing down.  He most clearly draws me to Him and makes me fall in love with Him over and over again when He listens to the apparently unimportant things, the ordinary things - the small things that change nothing big.

Something More

What I am looking for is

Something more

Than what I have right now

A sojourner’s heart

And a seeker’s feet

Not a settler’s homestead

And a field of maize

I want to be able to

Pull up the tent pegs

When You tell me to move

To leave behind

What needs to be left behind

And carry no excess baggage

I’m looking for

The unexpected and

The unanticipated

And the knowledge that I can

Embrace them both

Fearlessly

I’m looking for life outside

The rut and the routine

I want to create

New paths and patterns

That draw me closer

To You

The Workings of my Inner Ear

I was explaining a few days ago to a group of young people why I don't go to music festivals.  I would like to add the phrase "any more" but let's be real here - I am a stranger to music festivals.  Anything that has the potential to be loud is strictly off the menu!

It's not so much the event itself but what happens later.

I suffer from tinnitus.  It's perhaps a bit misleading to say I suffer from it as most times it is just a noise in the background that has been around since I can remember.  There are times when the noise stops being a background noise and promotes itself to the front-line. After any really loud environment my ears just buzz and whistle at a ramped up volume.  After a while, a day or two, the volume gradually turns itself down  but it never switches itself off.

Silence isn't something I know anything about.

Last night I broke my rule about not going to somewhere noisy.  It didn't occur to me that it would be noisy but when you are a part of a group of two dozen or more people letting off steam and saying goodbye to a work colleague - it was always going to get noisy. 

Most people in that kind of environment just have the noise to deal with.  I have the noise in the room added to my own personal noise in my ear.  Anyone speaking to me has to speak, not just above the noise in the room, but above my personal ear noise too.  Listening to conversation is a challenge. I try so hard to hear what people are saying and I focus on their faces almost trying to lip read.  On a Friday night it is all a bit to much for me - so I stopped listening and joining in the conversation.  I just simply stopped trying.

I daresay that some people reached the conclusion that I am not very sociable, or I am just really shy - and they wouldn't be entirely off the mark. I am not the greatest conversationalist.  The real saboteur of my social life is the tinnitus.

Malachi 3:16 says "Then those who feared the Lord talked with each other, and the Lord listened and heard."  On Sunday we had an special opportunity to talk with each other and I shared my inner ear woes with a friend.  My asking people in church to speak up was not uncommon and now she knew why.  I told her that I have a hearing test coming up soon and ended with saying there was no cure for tinnitus.

"Yes, there is a cure!" She didn't wait a moment, "Jesus can heal you!"

Would it not be wonderful to end this narrative by saying we prayed together and the tinnitus went?  It really would be wonderful - but that didn't happen.  My friend made the suggestion but she didn't drag me to Jesus to demand a healing touch.  She just showed me another way leaving me with the choice to take that path.

I haven't taken it yet.  A large part of me struggles with the thought that tinnitus is not life threatening.  It's not something you die from.  It's inconvenient and annoying at times, but not fatal.  Many of the healing miracles in the gospels did not feature life threatening diseases.  A man might have been blind or deaf but he was still functioning.  God want us to do more than just function.  The "life to the full" that Jesus spoke about in John 10 isn't about merely functioning.  

Going back to that opening conversation with the young people, they were fascinated by the whole inner ear issue.  Having told them about the sounds I hear in an empty room, someone asked me if I heard voices.  I told them I didn't.

It would appear that I do hear voices - not inner ear voices, but inner man voices. It is time to start listening and acting on the right voice.

Silence is Just a Word

My ears insist

There are noises

The whistle of a train

The buzz of a cricket

The deep rumble of

An articulated lorry

In an empty room

My eyes know

That my ears lie

My brain pays heed

To my ears

Unable to distinguish

Between real and

Imagined sounds

It cannot adjust the volume

And the off switch

Is broken

Silence

Is just a word

Tinnitus

Is not

Climbing the walls

Is possible

Vows

A week ago, or more, in our Bible study, one of the ladies mentioned that she regularly looked at the vows she had made to her husband to check that she was on track.  I was very ashamed to have to admit that I couldn’t remember exactly what it was that I had promised to do.  I think most people can come up with some vague phrases like “in sickness and in health” and “for richer for poorer”, but in my day, as well as the official vows, we were encouraged to write our own vows to make it personal.  It was these promises that I had forgotten.

I would like to say that I rushed home to look for my them, but I didn’t.  However, a week or two on, I have found them whilst looking for something else entirely.

Feel free to go “Ahhh”:-

Joseph, I love you.

You are the one my heart loves,

And in you I have been given
A man of God to share my life with.
In giving you to me, God has been faithful in giving the best.
I have full confidence in you as my husband
And I am proud and honoured to be your wife.

We no longer live separate lives, but are joined together.

I do not lose my life and personality in yours,
But I find fulfilment as your helper, companion and best friend.
I acknowledge and accept my responsibility,
And with God’s help, grace and strength I will strive to be worthy of God’s trust.

Joseph on this day, and forev er, I commit all that I am and all that I have to you.