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I asked our small group this last night without really insisting on an answer. I just wanted us all to go away and think about why we do this thing called “Church.” Why do you go to Church?

Maybe its a family tradition?
Maybe you met a boy/girl there and they ‘like’ Jesus so you want to keep them sweet?
Maybe you like the singing or the music is really rocking?
Maybe you think you should keep your foot in the door with God and attending scores a few points with Him?

There could be a million other reasons but, why do YOU go to Church?

Those of us who blog spend a lot of time talking about ourselves and the things we think and do. Thats not about to change anytime soon!

There are a list of things on my “about” page which are recurring themes around the blog and also in my general day to day existence. Saying they are “themes” is a little inaccurate though and it may be best that i go through them one at a time and say a little more…

You may have never looked at the list and at a glance some of it may be obvious, or maybe not? Well, we shall see

Stay tuned …..

The first thing to explain is : Jesus

from my Blipfoto

Our Church are embarking on “40 Days of Community” soon so that means promo material like posters & banners etc. This one rolled out of the printer and bounced onto the walls yesterday…

Find out what “40 Days of Community” is here

The very first album i bought, when i was 9……….

I am not sure there are any pictures of me playing bass where i am not blurred…

Cant keep still if im playing!

I was playing along with Who’s Next by The Who at lunch time, just to relax for a bit but really, who can relax with a John Entwistle bass line?

He was one of my favourites, a legend

Paisley, who is 83 years of age, has been an MP since 1970. It is thought that his son Ian Paisley Jr will face TUV leader Jim Allister in the constituency, which promises to be a mud slinging match! 

I wonder what he really thinks about the last 40 years? I wonder how he will be remembered?

In the reaction to this news, Martin McGuinnes of Sinn Fein has called Paisley a ‘personal friend,’ which says a huge amount about both men.

The cynics will say he changed his views during these last few years in order to leave a positive legacy behind. I don’t believe that for a second, as there is no way he can go back and undo the 30 years of politics that preceded his apparent change of heart.

His entire 40 years will be remembered, both positively and negatively by many but wow, he certainly left a mark on this country!

I may be biased but, i reckon Wayne Rooney is currently the most exciting player in word football. His arrival into the action on sunday in the League Cup Final changed the game.

Will he help Man United to a 4th League Championship title in a row? Will he inspire them to a Champions League triumph? Or will he be part of a World Cup winning England team this summer in South Africa?

Only time will tell, but for now its a pleasure to watch this guy play the beautiful game!

Aside from my parents i don’t think anyone else ever talked to me as much about Jesus when i was a child. I squirmed out of answers most of the time & used to dread her company but now that i am older and marginally wiser, i am grateful for “Auntie Gladys.” She was special!

To Jan, she was Nana……..this is her memories of her Nana

My Nana was a big lady. Her shoes could barely contain her. When she walked, little bits of her feet leaked out the sides. As a small child I plodded across her kitchen tiles and took laps of Great Nana’s bedroom, wearing her blood red heels and patent blacks, all the time wondering why they were almost as wide as long.

My Nana was a big lady. Ballymena could barely contain her. She burnt up and down the streets in a series of small cars- a mini-metro with a CB radio hidden under the dashboard, a silver grey bullet of unspecific origin, the passenger seat of which I gnawed to foam and nonsense on the daily school run home and the infamous, “I’m so sexy Saxo,” of her final driving days. As she lapped the town delivering shortbread, apple tarts and margarine tubs of home made vegetable broth to the sick, the shut in and the recently bereaved, she kept her stereo cranked to superhuman levels. Aside from a solitary Jim Reeves cassette, and two tapes of our second cousins singing gospel songs, most all of Nana’s music was of the male voice variety.

My Nana played piano like it was going out of fashion.

Upon arriving at the door of 10 Rockgrove Valley- having negotiated the ornamental rabbits and bird feeders, the potted plants and two tons of rabid Dalmatian wrecking havoc on your nylons- the surreptitious visitor (circa 1991,) might have been greeted by one of three sights. 1. My grandfather, watching endless episodes of Last of the Summer Wine, volume pumped to earthquake inducing levels, fully reclined in his reclining chair whilst shrapnel leaked from his trouser pockets, (a fact the Small Brother and I soon grew wise to, excavating for spare change, every time he vacated his chair.) 2. My Nana, fully reclined in her matching reclining chair, Take A Break firmly mounted to a red clipboard while she went at the puzzles with a mechanical pencil. 3. My Nana, installed at the upright piano, playing Jesus songs learnt by ear from the Believer’s Hymnbook. This by far was my favorite scene to stumble into.

As a very little child, (in the days before the Dalmatians, when the carpets of Rockgrove were still relatively hair free, and safe for lounging,) I remember lying on the floor, arranging my felt tips in rainbow order, as I was wont to do in those days, whilst I watched her feet pump the pedals; slowly, rhythmically like pistons clapping out some solitary dance. And while her voice was of the old-fashioned type, better suited to the revival tent than the concert hall, it was also an open-door of a voice, well accustomed to beckoning the stranger and the stumble-tongued into the song. As I sat under the piano stool listening and learning the ups and downs of the Old Rugged Cross, How Great Thou Art and Because He Lives I felt like a stowaway; a small, little light, privy to a much bigger secret.

To this day I have little time for the fall and rise of contemporary worship music- the Jesus is my boyfriend ballads, the stars and planets cosmology of the last five years and the endless repetition of monosyllabic sentiments- the old hymns are another thing entirely. The old hymns are grounded in a weighty, well-worn lyricism I’ve struggled to crawl away from. They puncture my stories like bullet points from my Presbyterian youth. They draw me deeply into literature; a love affair with library books which shows no sign of stopping. They make me tear up when Sufjan tackles Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing and hanker after Christian era Dylan. Though I’ve wondered my whole life what, “thine eye diffused a quickening ray,” might actually mean, (imagining- until teenage times turned me serious and sensible- Jesus Christ with laser beam eyes baring down on the ill-prepared world,) I still recognize a deep, holy gravity and a perfect literary turn behind And Can It Be That I Should Gain, which rolls out like God himself, wonderful and warm and simultaneously inscrutable.

Not to say the male voice choirs didn’t haunt my teenage years. I clearly remember the horror of exiting the school gates to spy my Nana, standing in the car park, Saxo doors flung open to the wide world, whilst the Ballymena Male Voice Choir roared their way through Power in the Blood. Though fully outed as a Mannifest attendee and a regular member of the rather diminutive Cambridge House Girls Grammar School, CU, I was not yet comfortable enough with my Christianity to endure the awkward rides home with new friends from school. My Nana firmly implanted in the School Car Park would stop girls coming out of school and ask them if they needed a lift home. It would matter not one jot to Nana whether I knew these girls or not. Clearly unaware of the potential danger of riding in cars with strange old ladies, many of these girls would accept the invitation. Over the course of the car journey to Ballykeel or Dunclug, or the front doors of the Tower Centre, my Nana would pass out the polo mints, crank up the Male Voice Choirs and ask mortifying questions like, “Do you know Jesus as your personal saviour, love?” I would sit in the back seat, chewing on the strap of my school bag, mortified and too young to realize that many of these girls adored my Nana for all the very same things that made me squirm. As I progressed through Grammar school I would make a point of getting out the front door before the bell had even stopped ringing, hoping to limit the devastating potential of my Nana’s kindness.

(My Nana, blessed with the kind of universal humanity which would lead her to ask my Grandfather why the Word Cup Final couldn’t be called a draw, just to save disappointing anyone, was wont to take pity on every needy case which stumbled across her path. In her early seventies we had to gently ask her to stop picking up strangers who looked like they might be a wee bit tired walking home from the town centre. Once at the age of eight I recall my grandfather bringing home three German backpackers who had, rather naively, stopped him to ask where the campsite was in Ballymena. By the time I arrived at Rockgrove Valley the Germans were pitching their tents in the pocket-sized front garden of my grandparents’ bungalow whilst Nana cooked them all an Ulster Fry. There was no Earthly point in trying to explain stranger danger to my Nana. She was clearly more of the, a stranger’s just a friend I haven’t met yet, ilk.)

Alzheimer’s stole the last five years of my Nana’s life. It was devastating to watch her shrink into herself. She stopped playing the piano. Her fingers turned into thumbs and ached. The knitting went first and then the piano. I held her hand as she died, feeling the songs slide out of her in small raspy breaths. I read Revelation over her deathbed and for the very first time caught a small drift of those elemental things she’d been coaxing out of the Believer’s Hymnbook.

I held her hand as she died. She was a small shadow of my baby days. Her hair was a cotton cloud halo, her face lost and birdlike and her feet barely big enough to hold a shoe together. My Nana was still a big lady. It took half the town to lay her to rest.

Read Jan’s blog here

“If you don`t know the blues… there`s no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.” Keith Richards

“Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”

So what is “meek?”

Gentle? Humble? Considerate?

Those are some of the words we use to describe someone who is ‘meek’ but last night in our small group i felt we needed to look a bit closer. In John Piper’s sermon on this verse, he asks from the outset “What does meekness have to do with God?”

If being meek is only part of who you are because you were constantly ‘put down’ as a child or because your parents were softly spoken, or because of your metabolism, then what does that have to do with God?

To try and understand the qualities of meekness we looked at Psalm 37. Trusting in God, committing our way to the Lord, being still and waiting patiently for him and refraining from anger and worry…….

Those roll of the tongue easily but i have to continually ask myself if i am really in tune with them, If i really grasp this.

The literal hebrew word for commit means, ‘to roll’ your way onto God. How often do you take the troubles of your day or week and just roll them off your shoulders onto God’s? He wants us to do this…..

James Ch 1 V 19-21 says “19: Know this, my beloved brothers; let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20: for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. 21: Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

Can we be gentle, humble or considerate without being ‘quick to hear, slow to speak’ or ’slow to anger?’

Can we be any of these things truthfully if we are not trusting in God? If we are not ‘rolling our way’ onto Him? Waiting patiently for him?

If we “get this” perhaps we get closer to being meek……..

I’ve been blogging for 5 years!

This month saw me reach a 5 year milestone with my endless moaning and complaining and occasional words of wisdom! I say ‘milestone’ because if i’m honest, i never expected i would still be blogging after 5 years.

Every so often the traffic dips into a valley and my pride tells me to quit!

There is some stuff in the archives which i no longer agree with or would adhere to but from time to time i like to look back at the past 5 years and see the growth and change that has taken place.

When i started to blog, i knew of nobody else locally or in my circle of friends who blogged. For a while i was ‘that guy who rattles on about blogging…….or bogging or something?’ Most people had no idea what or why or how!

Some of you followed though, copycats! I take no responsibility for your blabbering! Some of you should just quit! (kidding)

And here we are…..

I’ve changed jobs a couple of times, got married, flirted with graphic design, made friends, lost friends, caused some of you to ‘think,’ offended some of you, groomed my beard and quit doing ‘Christian music events’ – amongst other things…..

And so it goes on, this thing of ours!

Last year i began a slight musical obsession with Talking Heads and today i might have looked down the barrel of a similar foray into the work of Roxy Music. I listened to Country Life about 5 times today………….it is sublime though!

I would have posted the cover of Country Life instead of this image because it is a classic work of art, way ahead of its time BUT …………….ah google it & see for yourself!

On saturday it was frosty at the in-laws……

Yes, yes i know that could have a double meaning, haha

As we arrived and exited the car i quickly snapped this with my iPhone

Elton John said this

“I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don’t know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East — you’re as good as dead.”

He also wrote these words

“Say, Candy and Ronnie, have you seen them yet, But they’re so spaced out, Bennie and the Jets. Oh but they’re weird and they’re wonderful, Oh Bennie she’s really keen
She’s got electric boots a mohair suit. You know I read it in a magazine, Bennie and the Jets”

You do the math!

“When i see a man leering at a woman, it makes me cringe. Anger can be ugly. When i see someone become enraged it is unsightly. Worry is unbecoming, and judging others is repulsive. When i hear someone saying terrible things about another, i feel ill. Pride and prejudice, deception and degradation – all are ugly. When i see these in others, its is clearly unattractive.

But when i see them in myself, i am quick to rationalise and minimise them. ”

from The Good & Beautiful Life by James Bryan Smith