The joy of the Lord is indeed my strength!! + Rend Collective’s latest album

-

It’s funny how sometimes an album/cd or song can hang around in your iTunes or near your cd player for sometime and get hardly any plays, and then suddenly one day you put it on and the penny drops and it starts to make perfect sense to you and you wonder why it didn’t before and you can’t stop playing it… and… and… :-)

Well, that’s happened to me today with Rend Collective’s most recent album, “As Family We Go”, which was released just over 6 months ago. I am a massive fan of this group and use many of their songs in our school worship band and as form period resources, as well as in my own personal prayer. Somehow this most recent album didn’t click with me when I first heard it. None of the tracks made it onto my “Best Bitz 2015 Megmixtape” (an annual thing of mine!). Not because it was bad in any way, I just think now that I had to be ready for it, and I wasn’t.

And then this morning I was looking for fresh Eastertide-themed musical resources to send form teachers in my work as a school Chaplain and I stumbled upon “Joy Of The Lord” from “As Family We Go” on YouTube… and the penny dropped. Rend Collective seem to specialise in Eastertide-themed songs. Just look at their previous album “The Art Of Celebration”. But the joy they sing of is not a superficial happy-clappy kind of joy. It is joy that is hard won, a joy that endures in the midst of suffering, the joy of which Matt Redman wrote about so well in “Blessed Be Your Name”...

“When the darkness closes in Lord, still I will say,
Blessed Be The Name Of The Lord!!"

It’s the joy of someone who whilst acknowledging the darkness in our world around us (terrorism, war, the refugee crisis, personal suffering…) actively chooses to look at, to look into the light, to lift ones eyes up to the heavens and sing “THE JOY OF THE LORD IS MY STRENGTH!!!” and in so doing finds that the clouds lift, perhaps with the cleansing rain of tears, the soul’s burdens fade away and a smile returns, safe in the knowledge that the Lord loves me more than I could ever imagine and that if I but trust in him then all will indeed be well.

I think I (and others) need help in doing this right now and I have a gut feeling that this album will do just that. I’m now really looking forward to getting to know it better.

A great live version:

Popular posts from this blog

District 9 - a sci-fi anti-apartheid allegory and the first handheld camera masterpiece?

-
Image
Following on from yesterday's post, here's an interesting article from The Guardian film blog . District 9: Where aliens come to Earth and handheld comes of age District 9, the shock blockbuster produced by Peter Jackson, isn't just notable for its box office dominance and viral marketing campaign. It's also the closest thing to a handheld masterpiece that's yet been made Handheld on handholding … A still from District 9 Lars, time to break out that cigar. When Dogme 95 was brewing, I wonder if von Trier seriously thought his cin-emetic had any chance of influencing pop culture. With the release of sci-fi blockbuster District 9 , we have the answer: the handheld style has finally come of age. The setup - filmed in to-camera interviews with its pencil-neck protagonist, Wikus Van de Merwe, and intrepid Unsteadicam as he enters the extra-terrestrial township - is jarring in the very best way. And traditional complaints of motion sickness, migraine and general inner-ea
Read more

God You don't need me, but somehow You want me - Tenth Avenue North, “Control”

-
Image
I sent the below message to my teaching colleagues in school this evening, braced as we are for the arrival of “those-who-shall-not-be-named” (i.e. OFSTED, national school inspectors) sometime between now and Easter. For those of you who live outside of Britain their job is to monitor and ensure high standards in all schools… the problem is that they keep moving the goalposts. Anyway, enough of that. Here’s what I said: I think that the attached video teaching is for us right now, to help us not lose sight of who we are and why we are here in a Catholic school. It's too late for the weekend just gone, but try to take on board its message of "wasting time for God" over the coming weeks, despite the pressures that we are all under. Even if you are not a believer yourself, give yourself some time alone with your thoughts, if you can… even just a few minutes.  The video teaching is by one of my favourite bands, Tenth Avenue North, and it accompanies a song of
Read more

Transcendent God

-
Over the past few months I have become much more aware of the beauty of the Grail translation of the Psalms that we use in Morning and Evening Prayer (Divine Office) - I will write more about this in the near future - and I am also finding that this has rubbed off on my attitude to the other prayers in the Office. For example, the following hymn that we prayed just over a week ago. The words struck me as if I was discovering them anew, and this after having prayed (or simply recited?) them at least once a month for about 25 years.  The optimism of the imagery struck me most forcefully and I love the idea of God hearing our prayer "before we call", i.e. as the paslmist says elsewhere "before ever a word was on my lips... you knew me through and through" (I paraphrase). See what you think yourselves... Morning Prayer of Sunday, week 3 Transcendent God in whom we live, The Resurrection and the Light, We sing for you a morning hymn To end the si
Read more