Let me feed your soul.
We don’t have a good word for it, so we stole one from another language and then gave it a new meaning — agape. It’s current meaning as “holy and sacrificial compassion” was actually established by the Septuagint some time before Christ. But it was the birth of Christianity that gave the word wide recognition before it was all frozen by the demise of heart-led living. The word now serves you and I as a parabolic expression of our recovery of that heart-led existence. John saw that coming near the end of his career, and wrote of it in his Apocalypse.
Perhaps you won’t see it as a cheap escape from the work of writing to link a couple of YouTube videos. The first is a duet from with Mylon LeFevre and Carole Ford. She doesn’t get nearly the attention he has gotten, but her voice is so lovely, a grand compliment to his. This was the final cut from his 1987 album Crack the Sky.
Then I would like to jump back to an earlier album of his, More from 1983. Again the final cut, but this song has less of him and more of what made him. That is, Mylon’s conversion came at a concert early in the career of Second Chapter of Acts, in which Matt Ward and his two sisters — Annie Herring and Nelly Greisen — brought high-powered high-brow vocal training and talent to the Contemporary Christian Music scene. You’ll hear the unmistakable soaring tenor of Matt Ward on this one. It’s actually two songs, the first a recitation from John’s Apocalypse, where the Lamb of God is revealed and celebrated. The second part of the song is Mylon’s imagination of what it might sound like. The title of the two is “Praise Hymn” and “The Gift.”
I’ve owned the albums but the physical media has long since been lost in an emergency move to escape Hurricane Rita. These two are among the songs I’ve pulled off YouTube and converted into MP3 files for occasional inspiration.
Prayer request: While the OS is now more tolerant of keyboard errors on this laptop, I’m still having enough trouble with it that I need to replace it. I’m not worried about the task itself, but as keyboards go, it’s not cheap because of the back-lighting — OEM is around $30 and payday is another couple of weeks. I need patience with this thing until the replacement is available. Otherwise, this is a really great machine for the ministry.
