Loving this Tune

An album by Andrew Peterson has been getting steady playing time lately.  It’s a Christmas album of his own songs, and it’s got a fantastic flow from start to finish as the songs really follow the flow of the Scriptures, right from the early Old Testament stories, through the Exodus, the prophets, and the birth of Jesus.  It’s very well done and puts the “Christmas story” into a big-picture context that’s pretty helpful.

My favourite song on the album has to be one sung by Derek Webb.  If you get a chance to hear it, go for it.  Lyrics are below…

Deliver Us

Our enemy, our captor is no Pharaoh on the Nile.
Our toil is neither mud nor brick nor sand.
Our ankles bear no callouses from chains,
Yet Lord, we’re bound.
Imprisoned here, we dwell in our own land.

Deliver us, deliver us.
Oh Yahweh, hear our cry,
And gather us beneath Your wings tonight.

Our sins,they are more numerous than all the lambs we slay.
These shackles, they were made with our own hands.
Our toil is our atonement and our freedom Yours to give.
So Yahweh, break Your silence if You can.

‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem
How often I have longed
To gather you beneath My gentle wings.’

“How’s Your Week Been?”

I got asked that several times on the weekend; my answer?”It didn’t go how I’d planned it.”

One friend replied, “Oh, more of my weeks are like that than the going-according-to-plan kind.”

I think that sentence was supposed to offer comfort. Didn’t work.

This may sound like minor stuff, but I found it very frustrating. Last week was a week in which I anticipated enjoying more freedom than usual. Some of my weekly duties weren’t in effect last week, enough so that I was eagerly eyeing my schedule: The reading I was going to do, the planning for down the road, the writing, the visiting,… what a week it was going to be!

And then life happened.

And it happened in a way that I hadn’t planned.  How dare it!

Twenty-minute jobs took two hours. One-hour jobs stretched into three. Tasks I had even dreamed up started popping out of the woodwork. Grrrrr!

And I wouldn’t claim to know why, but this ugly little doggie called Get-Nothing-Done-and-Fast felt the need to follow me home from the office.

Now putting up curtain rods (a small job, right?) had to involve an errand for new brackets, a trip across town to borrow a drill that I wasn’t planning on using, a dead battery on the drill five minutes into the job, another trip for another drill, another dead battery (I’m not making this up), a sigh of thanks that I’d borrowed two batteries this time, a broken piece of hardware, some rummaging around in the basement for new  bits of hardware, and curtain rods are finally up.

That was but one example of about five from the weekend.  The weekend… you know: The relaxing, laid-back part of your week, when you’re never tempted to say bad words.

All that said, life’s actually pretty good these days. Really.

Blogging’s just bringing out the best in me lately.

Merry Christmas!