I was at Alpha tonight and I was talking about how we can be sure about our faith. One of the points in the talk is that we can trust Jesus because when he makes promises he keeps them. There was a great atmosphere tonight at Alpha, we were at the back of the restaurant and we were all round one table. The food was good and the fellowship was warm. And you know what, I felt the Holy Spirit was really speaking to all of us. It reminded me of the words of Jesus, ” Look I stand at the door and I’m knocking, if anyone hears me and opens the door, I’m ready to come in and share a meal with them” (Rev 3.20)

Holman Hunt the famous victorian painter used the title to paint a picture of the risen Christ standing knocking at the heart’s door of everyman. One thing I’m sure of we all have to make the choice to open the door.

If you look closely at the painting you’ll notice the handle is on the inside. Someone once said, Jesus Christ never forced his way into anyone’s life, he is the perfect gentleman, he waits to be invited.

If you were at Alpha tonight and you opened the door to invite Christ into your life, I’d love to hear from you.

Well the bookshop gig continues. In the next section recorded below, I begin to develop a bit of a rant. I start off talking about church going and end up introducing a song written by Ian Walker entitled “Hawks and Eagles fly like Doves.” An amazingly sad song about the troubles in South Africa, yet full of hope. Desmond Tutu in his book , ” No Future Without Forgiveness” at the very end, highlights the fact that no situation is ever too hopeless for God to step in and change. As I write this blog, the movement for democracy in Burma looks like being snuffed out by the might and power of the military machine.

Yet these words of Tutu have an air of authority about them. He writes

” God does have a sense of humour. Who in their right mind could ever have imagined South Africa to be an example of anything but awfulness; of how not to order a nation’s race relations and its governance? We South Africans were the unlikeliness lot and that is precisely why God has chosen us. We cannot really claim much credit ourselves for what we have achieved. We were destined for perdition and got plucked out of total annihilation… God intends that others might look at us and take courage. God wants to point to us as a possible beacon of hope, a possible paradigm and to say, ” Look at South Africa. They had a nightmare called apartheid. It has ended. Northern ireland ( or wherever) your nightmare will end too.” I pray to God that the people of Burma’s nightmare will end now. Here’s the clip from the bookshop.

I’ve always been attracted to bookshops and rivers. Here is a picture of the Amazon at Sunset. This picture reminds me that I’m always glad to be near the end of my journey when sunset happens on the Amazon. Sunset over the Amazon is also a time when you don’t want to be stepping into the river. All kinds of wild life wakens up just after 5.30pm.

Now if the river can be dangerous so can bookshops, as those who attended this concert can testify. Talking about bookshops, years ago as a student I used to spend hours looking through the many second hand bookshops that were around in those days. I remember visiting my sister who lived in Inverness at the time and breaking the journey in Perth, just to see what I could find by way of books. I met a Free Church Minister that day, called Ian R Tulloch, who overheard me looking for an edition of Jonathan Edwards works. I certainly didn’t look like the typical Edwards reader, with my leather jacket and jeans, yet he invited me back for dinner to his home and gave me a very interesting edition of “Boston’s Fourfold State ” Here’s the actual book.

So its quite interesting to be talking about the place that books play in all our lives. John Ortberg wrote a best seller a few years back called “if you want to walk on water you gotta get out of the boat” well Iain and I wrote a song about water walking in the early 90s. Have a listen to the concert as it begins to develop a bit more. “Step into the water”, invites us all to take risks and make history for God.

While preparing and doing some research for the next Bogle Band Album, I came across a pile of tapes from the Bogle Band Tour of the States in 1998. We spent a week in Minneapolis touring round Universities and Colleges. We even managed to play in Kieran’s Irish Pub. However I discovered a recording of the day we played in the Edina Bookshop. I’ll put some posts up over the next few days highlighting the concert. I think it was a classic. If you listen to my accent over the course of the hour it changes as does my mood from being rather serious to being ridiculously flippant. We finally finish up as a band simply laughing at ourselves being in this strange situation playing songs in a bookshop. We started the set trying desperately hard to connect with our audience, the whole ten of them! Hence the reference to books in my study and this song, called Fools Wisdom,Fools Wisdom, which has a real bookshop appeal to it. The picture above is an authentic photograph taken that day at the bookshop. The picture below is a genuine picture of my study.