The times, they are a-changin’

I like Friday afternoons in work. My colleagues are a little more disciplined than I am through the week, and come in early every day, building up enough hours to let them take a half day on Friday. I am not so good at doing that, so inevitably I end up spending Friday afternoon in the office by myself, putting in the time. We have been listening to Cool FM (local radio station and thorn in my flesh) all week, and my head is mashed with the sounds of Basshunter, Cheryl Cole, and other such non-musical geniuses. But my colleagues have just left, I made coffee, switched off the radio, and pressed play on the CD player. I am now listening to the graceful, never-gets-old sound of the master himself, Bob Dylan. The first track on my disc is ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’; there is something about his voice, the questioning of the lyrics, the quiet rhythm of the guitar, that just instantly makes me feel calm, relaxed, happy. Bob Dylan makes me smile.

There’s something wonderful about going back to old familiar places. Like when you dig out an old CD you haven’t listened to for years, and it just hits the spot. I love rediscovering music I used to love, and realising how much I still enjoy it, even if it isn’t quite as cutting edge as I thought at the time. I love how hitting play on an old CD can just take me back in my mind to where I was when I first heard it – who I was with, what I was doing, even what kind of mood I was in. I listened to Coldplay’s ‘Rush of Blood to the Head’ again a few days ago – I haven’t listened to the full album in a long, long time. I was instantly transported back to the day I moved into my first rented house by myself. I treated myself to the album (it was going cheap in Tesco). I remember coming home, pulling the curtains, lying on the sofa with the lights dimmed, listening to the album straight through about three times, louder than I ever could have when I shared a house with other people. It was a moment of freedom for me. I was straight back there when I listened to it again a few days ago.

I’m a sucker for old familiar stuff. I love Muse, Florence & the Machine, The Killers, Electric Soft Parade – but give me Nina Simone, Miles Davies, Marvin Gaye, Sting & The Police, Bob Dylan over those guys any day of the week. If I’m having a cosy night in, I’ll always go for the book I’ve read and loved a dozen times over the years, rather than a new one that I have to start from scratch. Some people would call that ‘resistance to change’. I don’t think it’s that. I like new stuff – I’ll try most things once. But I know what I like, and I like what I know.

I tend to find that in trying to live out my faith, there is a partnership of old and new. God loves to take his people back to old familiar places. In Genesis, God prompted Isaac to reopen the wells that had been dug in the time of his father Abraham, and stopped up by the Philistines. He revisited the old places, went back to what he knew, what was familiar. He even gave the wells the same names his father had before. The wells were a familiar place – a refreshing place, a place of provision and nourishment, a place of strengthening.

About a year after I became a Christian, I started going to an Anglican church in Belfast. I’d never been to a church like it before – one that used prayer books and liturgy. At the start, I was scornful of it; it seemed lazy and stilted – unimaginative, even – to read prayers out of books along with the rest of the congregation. But after a few months, I started to soften in my attitude towards it, and I began to see huge significance in the liturgy and the prayers. The words started to get into my head, so I didn’t need the book any more, but rather than becoming rote prayers without meaning, I saw the value in coming back to something so familiar, so safe – something that led me into engagement with God. I started to value and appreciate liturgy – something I never thought I would do. Even though I no longer attend an Anglican church, I still go back to liturgy and the prayer book occasionally – it has become an old familiar place for me.

But being a Spirit-filled Christian isn’t just about the familiar. It’s coupled with this wonderful, dynamic journey into the new and undiscovered. Like the first time you listen to Muse’s ‘Plug in baby’, or the first time you watched City of God, or the first time you kissed someone who really cared – it’s an explosion of new experience. None of the anticipation quite prepares you for what’s in store.

The very nature of God – the fact that He stands outside of time, knows our coming and our going, holds the future – makes Him utterly unpredictable. There is nothing tired or repetitive about God. His love is never unimaginative – His Spirit never runs out of fresh ideas. He promises new wine. His mercies are new every morning. You can’t ever get to the end of God. He is unfathomable and inexhaustible. You can’t reach the end of His mysteries, and wonder what comes next, because He always is. He is utterly unchanging, and life with Him is one of constant change and newness. He is what you have always known, and what you will never fully understand. He is the Ancient of Days, before the beginning of time, holding up the world – and through Jesus He is the mediator of the new covenant, the departure from the old traditions, and the door to new life. He is the old familiar place. He is the dynamic new adventure.

I love that dichotomy in the nature of God. I love how we can see it in the life of the church. We’re forging new paths. God is leading us into new territories, giving us fresh ideas, introducing new concepts – and yet we are building on what has been before. We are part of something that has been in existence since the beginning of time – the great history of God and His church. The church can be an old familiar place. The church can be a dynamic new adventure. Both can be good. Together, both are great. It’s not like having to choose between Bob Dylan and Muse, because you can’t listen to both together. The great thing about pursuing new pathways with God is that as you set out, you realise that it is all familiar, all safe, all part of what has gone before.

“What has been will be again,
  What has been done will be done again;
  There is nothing new under the sun.
  Is there anything of which one can say,
  ‘Look! This is something new’?
  It was here already, long ago;
  It was here before our time.
  I know that everything God does will endure forever;
  nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.
  God does it so that men will revere him.
  Whatever is has already been,
  And what will be has been before…”
  Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, 3:14-15

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