麻豆约拍

Good morning.听 If you鈥檙e planning to go to a show or a concert tonight, I envy you. One of my favourite artistes, Neil Young, features the thought in one of his songs that, at his concerts, 鈥淟ive Music is Better - bumper stickers will be issued!"听

听And, as an inveterate concert goer myself, I cannot but agree with him.

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The experience of having a live musician playing music, with skill and passion, is capable of providing a thrill and delight not even approached by merely listening to a CD or a download.

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I must have listened to Art Garfunkel sing 鈥淏ridge Over Troubled Water鈥� in that haunting angelic voice of his, literally hundreds of times since my student days. A wonderful song, 听sung with beauty and sensitivity. I鈥檝e listened to it in my student flat, my car, my front room, in other people鈥檚 houses and, once, memorably at a harbour-side taverna in Paxos 鈥搘hile sipping a fresh orange juice in the soft evening sun. All great experiences!

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Yet, none of those came even close to the hair-tingling, tear-generating experience of hearing him sing it, live in concert in Glasgow recently : an experience of such raw emotion and intensity the vibrations of it stayed and have never left. 听It was as if the song moved from out there鈥�to in here鈥�to the heart!

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Something like that can happen with faith and religion too. That moment when the Man in the Book addresses one life 鈥� my life 鈥� and it all moves from the theoretical to the personal鈥�from the abstract to the real.

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You no longer sing hymns, you praise God. Something new and different has begun. And you move from talking about God, to talking to him. Something has happened. Something new is begun.

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Lord, show me how faith can have meaning in my life: how you can come from the Bible story, into my story.

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Amen.