Jane writes:

There is rarely a time when I don’t want to analyse a song and think in detail about its content, its message, its tune etcetera, etcetera. But every now and again a song appears that seem to speak for itself.

This is such a song. It’s a soul-piercing piece of great impact. I can’t say it’s perky or indeed in any way optimistic but it does give serious food for thought. Here are the lyrics:

These are the days of the open hand

They will not be the last

Look around now

These are the days of the beggars and the choosers

This is the year of the hungry man

Whose place is in the past

Hand in hand with ignorance

And legitimate excuses

The rich declare themselves poor

And most of us are not sure

If we have too much

But we’ll take our chances

‘Cause God’s stopped keeping score

I guess somewhere along the way

He must have let us all out to play

Turned his back and all God’s children

Crept out the back door

And it’s hard to love, there’s so much to hate

Hanging on to hope

When there is no hope to speak of

And the wounded skies above say it’s much, much too late

Well, maybe we should all be praying for time

These are the days of the empty hand

Oh, you hold on to what you can

And charity is a coat you wear twice a year

This is the year of the guilty man

Your television takes a stand

And you find that what was over there is over here

So you scream from behind your door

Say, “What’s mine is mine and not yours”

I may have too much but I’ll take my chances

‘Cause God’s stopped keeping score

And you cling to the things they sold you

Did you cover your eyes when they told you

That he can’t come back

‘Cause he has no children to come back for

It’s hard to love, there’s so much to hate

Hanging on to hope when there is no hope to speak of

And the wounded skies above say it’s much too late

So maybe we should all be praying for time

Sometimes God cuts through in the words of others. Maybe they will today.

More can be found out about George Michael’s legacy here https://www.georgemichael.com/

• 

We’re living in unprecedented times and the next few weeks will be challenging for those of us who are used to regularly meeting to worship, hear the Word and pray together.

The next few weeks call us to be church in different ways. Our weekly Friday Fix will try to give food for thought about the times that we are in and if you have something to contribute, please send it to Gill on thomasg@methodistchurch.org.uk.

Our Social Media posts will be supporting, encouraging and sharing ideas on ways that we can connect and worship. Let’s not be socially distant even if we are physically distant.

If you don’t follow us on social media, you can find us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/LN.EastCentral and on Twitter @LNEastCentral.

Finally, our lovely colleague Rev Nel Shallow, Grantham & Vale of Belvoir Circuit has put together some ideas, resources and suggestions on how to worship and how to be church at a time of ‘distant socialising’. You can download the PDF on the box below.

Clive writes:

‘May your wishes all come true’ might make this seem at first glance like a trite song. But it’s a blessing from the start: ‘May God bless and keep you always’. Then there are lots of other telling sentiments: ‘May you grow up to be righteous, / May you grow up to be true, / May you always know the truth…May you always be courageous…May you have a strong foundation / When the winds of changes shift / May your heart always be joyful…’

Dylan wrote it for one of his sons. We can now receive the song not as a straightforward longing for eternal youthfulness in the sense of an interminable life of the kind that we might know in our youths (for what if we wouldn’t want our youths to be repeated?).

It works as an appeal to grasp after and hold on to deep and powerful convictions about the fulfilled life. The kind of ongoing youthfulness that it is worth aspiring to is about righteous, joyful, truthful, courageous living. Seek those things and we shall feel young, invigorated, spirit-filled, whatever our age. Never give up on justice. Never step back from truth-seeking. 

I’ve seen Dylan a few times live. He’s as exasperating a performer as everyone says: playing songs you know well in versions which you don’t even recognise at first; not having much rapport with his audience (or at least not talking to them much); mumbling his lines without sometimes being in tune. But then you remind yourself: he can do what he likes – these are his words. He wrote all this stuff (words and music). If he wants to go up rather than down when singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, then he can! He can be as playful as he likes with his words and his melodies. And he inevitably attracts quality touring musicians to create tight, lively bands around him.

Dylan therefore creates an ‘occasion’, a memory, which is worth recalling, alongside the multiple listenings – on CD, or streamed – of songs he’s produced. You can even get away with singing along with him out of tune because he often does too (…though preferably do that at home rather than in public). Participation matters. (‘Forever youuuuuuuuuung…..for-ever youuuuung….May yooooooou stayyyyyyy………’) It’s how music works best. It’s also how blessings and other prayers become part of who we are. 

Jane writes:

I seem to have a habit of hearing a band and then getting totally immersed in what they offer.

I hear one song and then seek out a back catalogue, a gig and keep on looking for whatever is coming out as new.

This is just the case with The Lone Bellow. One song and I was hooked.  A visit to Leeds at the Brudnell Social Club cemented my affection for all their close harmonies, life focussing lyrics and their intimate approach to BIG songs.

So a new album and new music brings me real joy.  In particular the track -Count on Me.

It speaks of deep friendship.  Of that willingness that comes from an honesty that can sooth and challenge without discrimination.  We all need to be loved and indeed, our really good friends would do that unconditionally, regardless of all those petty and weird things that make us us. 

But they must also be there to pick up the pieces when its gone horribly wrong and they can carefully mop us up even if we are a bit broken.  Sometimes friends for me are the honesty that says you know you are going to have to deal with this.  It’s painful.  It might break you but we are here and we love you all the same.  I’m a crier. A shouter. A person who wants harmony.  Sometimes though walking away or facing the agony is about self-preservation and doing that alone is a daunting prospect. You need a friend of the truest kind to be alongside with their arm around your neck.

As people of faith many of us might feel the same way about God.  Its not always that simple.  Whoever you have in your corner though being able to count on them is what counts.  

“Let it break you
Let it help you lay down what you held onto
Let it break you
You can count on me, I can count on you
To help you lay down what you held onto
Help you lay down what you held onto”

You can find out much more about The Lone Bellow here  https://www.thelonebellow.com/home

Gill writes:

Sometimes a song collides with a significant moment in your life. It expresses your thoughts and feelings better than you could. ‘Wires’ is one of those songs for me.

The song was released in January 2005 when my son was 3 months old. Although he was born without any intervention (it was down to one last push or the ventouse was at the ready), he was in quite some distress and this resulted in him spending a few hours in the Special Baby Care Unit.

Although he wasn’t rushed through the hospital ‘running down corridors, through automatic doors‘ and subjected to ‘wires’ as Athlete’s lead singer Joel Pott’s daughter was, the words really evoked the experience at the time – and still continue to do so. I remember the panic on my husband’s face when he came back to find us on the maternity ward and we weren’t there; I remember sitting helplessly next to the tiny, little bundle ‘in a plastic box‘; I remember seeing the determination and lifeforce in his eyes and feeling sure that it was going to be alright.

From the moment of conception, I’ve always had a strong awareness that I have no control over this life that had been created. Right from the beginning I’ve been learning to let go. It can be so easy to take life for granted; to think that life is a right when it’s actually a gift.

‘Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes’ (James. 4:14)

Our lives are precious and fragile but for some reason we humans have a tendency to be rather arrogant and nonchalant about something so fragile as life. Funny really because when we own something that we think is delicate and breakable, we have a tendency to take extra special care of it. Why don’t we do this with our own lives?

Revisiting ‘Wires’ again has reminded me that I could make more time for others; that I could show more love to others; that I need to live more today and not worry too much about tomorrow. Life is indeed fragile. Handle it with the same care that God has for creation.

(And just in case you’re wondering, that tiny bundle is a strapping, rugby-playing, full-of-testosterone teenager – ‘looking at you now, you would never know’!)

Athlete still have a website which you can check out at http://www.athlete.mu/home.

Clive writes:

This is one of Elton John’s finest songs. It is underperformed – though Elton John has played it live sometimes, and there are a few versions on YouTube – and is hidden away on the 1972 album Honky Chateau, as part of that rich seem of ‘Americana’ material that he and his lyricist Bernie Taupin produced in the early 1970s (listen also to Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across the Water, before you head to Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Caribou).

It’s still something of a mystery how a lyricist from rural Lincolnshire could come up, in his late teens and early twenties, with evocative, poetic lyrics which an emerging rock star from Pinner could make use of. But that’s what happened. Taupin must have been about 21 when he wrote ‘Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters’ just as he and Elton John were about to become big in the USA and having their first experiences staying in large American cities.

As a song it invites meditative reflection on the fact that it takes all sorts to make up a world and that a city brings alongside each other people with great differences, and that rich and poor live cheek by jowl in a modern city, with all the challenges and tensions that such economic distinctions produce.  

For a townie from Merseyside this song was evocative. A trip to New York was surely never ever going to be on the cards (I wondered from my teenage bedroom what it was like). I find it staggering that I have been three times since and made trips, because of academic conference work, to a dozen or so other North American cities. I’m checking my carbon footprint much more these days but cannot pretend that I didn’t (and don’t) find such city-visits exciting and challenging. I always ensure I don’t just visit the ‘tourist bits’.  

I’ve no idea what Taupin and John themselves make of their own lyric ‘I thank the Lord for the people I have found’. But the depth of gratitude seems real enough: wherever you are, and whatever the circumstances you find yourselves in, be grateful for whoever helps you get through. I really do think this proves to be a deep, and profoundly significant, evangelistic insight. God is wherever gratitude is being expressed. And wherever gratitude is being expressed, then important things are happening. (For the record, this kind of stuff crops up when people start telling their own stories ruthlessly honestly…).

Three years later, in the title-track of their autobiographical album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Taupin and John would conclude: ‘And all this talk of Jesus coming back to see us / Mmm mmm couldn’t fool us / For we were spinning out our lines walking on the wire /Hand in hand went music and the rhyme’. Perhaps they’d dispensed with all explicit religion by then. Or perhaps it was just reservation about particular aspects of eschatology. Who knows? And they have both now got a further 45 years of life-experience to work with. 

At any rate, the lyric, and the wonderful song they created together, leaps out of their own experience and helps others. 

Elton John website can be found here – https://www.eltonjohn.com/ and you can find out more about the Lincolnshire ‘lad’, Bernie Taupin here http://www.berniejtaupin.com/