Blessings #177 – Rediscovering lost music

Tonight I’ve been doing some voluntary ‘design’ work for church and I was looking for some music to accompany it. I wanted some instrumental background music to help my concentration so started up Spotify and picked a radio station.

After a little while I heard some music that I haven’t heard for what must be nearly 20 years.

I used to have it on cassette tape, that’s how old it was. The tape got played over and over when I was ay Polytechnic and trying to study.

It was played so often that it just wore out.

Hearing those notes reminded me of a little red JVC portable cassette player that I used to play it on when I wanted to focus in on myself. It was the red one in the picture:

The particular music is a stripped back instrumental piece with a guitar and very minimal strings accompaniment.

The melody brought back all sorts of memories of early married life when Sue and I lived in a rented bungalow. We had time to sit and to listen and to be together.

It revived memories of pray times when I felt the presence of God in a way that I can neither explain nor describe.

The rhythms of those days rang down the years straight back into my mind and my spirit.

It’s left me with a bit of a dilemma though. Now that I’ve remembered it and know what it’s called should I purchase it and return it to my music collection? Or should I leave it as a memory, a reminder that I may one day again rediscover?

We can’t live in the past and yet the past is so much of who we are.

A friend recently quoted someone else on twitter saying:

The Bible describes salvation in three tenses: past, present, future. To ignore anyone of these tenses will skew our view of salvation.

How true.

(The music was from an album by John Michael Talbot called The Quiet)