It’s Time To Reconsider

Yesterday at our ‘Singing for Health’ group we sang:

You put de lime in de coconut, you mix it all up
Put de lime in de coconut, you mix it all together…

We’ve sung it for several weeks. It’s good fun. I assumed it was a West Indian traditional song… I discovered it’s written by white singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson (just using one chord!) I had to reconsider.

Then I found the muppets singing it – that required further reconsideration!

Yesterday’s ‘Lowestoft Journal’ informs us ‘A Costa Coffee branch has revealed its ‘exciting’ new look following a two month-long overhaul… enhancing customer experience and offering greater convenience to coffee lovers in the area…’

‘…Returning even brighter and bolder, we are confident that our customers will enjoy an even more enhanced Costa Coffee experience at our refreshed store in Lowestoft.’

They hope I’ll reconsider my Costa visits and buy more of their coffee. I’ve reconsidered. I won’t.

Last night I watched Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood’. One of the characters, Polly Garter, is a promiscuous single mother with many children. She’s disapproved of by the married women; she’s a source of desire for the local men.

I should disapprove of her… As I watched I reconsidered, seeing her strengths, as well as her flaws… within her moral framework there was an honest integrity… she was strong, standing alone against hypocritical women… she was a good mother to her children…

I finished quite liking her.

This morning I read Romans 10. Paul looks back to faith of a bygone era… Moses saying, ‘God is near’, Isaiah saying, ‘God is reliable’, Joel saying, ‘God is for everyone’.

He says reconsider faith in the light of your current situation – not the faith that you’ve heard about or inherited…

It’s the reframing of the song, the change of behaviour of going to Costa, seeing people like Polly in a new light… It’s discovering that faith in Jesus is living and relevant, felt in our hearts, talked about with conviction…