Virtual Methodist

So here is part 3 of my series of posts based on last Sunday's Harvest Celebration of Creation and Creativity, inspired by Genesis 1. The main part of this blog, a dramatised paraphrase of Psalm 8, I have posted a number of times before in different forms... and I was going to skip it, until on Tuesday a colleague used Psalm 8 and the Casting Crowns below as part of the devotions at a training day I was at. On Sunday we also used a version of the same song, but sung by the wonderful Melanie Johnston. Great minds think alike... or something like that... And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning--the second day. Genesis 1: 6-8 Dramatised Reading : Psalm 8 BOTH:          O LORD , our God, your name is ho...

Earlier on this month a friend posted another Christmas song on facebook, and while I had heard it before, I'd never really listened and knew nothing of the background to it. It was Casting Crowns' live version of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" which I have posted below... It is probably better known among my American friends not only in this version, but numerous others, including variations by artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Cash, The Carpenters, Bing Crosby and Bette Midler. Most of them, however, omit the central stanzas of the poem on which it is based... "Christmas Bells" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). That's probably because they refer to the American Civil War which was raging when Longfellow wrote this poem on December 25th 1864. Yet it is the contrast between the dreadful reality of war and the promise of God's peace that lends the real power to this poem. I heard the bells on Ch...