Soteria Music

After a long break S:WMD is pleased to welcome back our old compadre and co-founder of WMD Phil Gray!
In recent months Phil, under his own label of PGIMedia has been working with S:WMD on such notable projects as “Carols in the Cavern”. Now Phil has re-joined taking on the technical side of the operations.

He has returned with a whole new batch of ideas, most of which we’ll see played out in the forthcoming months I’m sure. In fact he now so keen that at the meeting where all this was decided, (in the glamorous location of the café at Truro’s branch of Tesco), he handed me a new lyric he’d like me to write music to!

In just a few weeks Phil and his wife are expecting their third baby. We wish them all God’s blessings.

So S:WMD is now officially restored to factory settings, and once Baby Gray has safely arrived and settled in I’m sure we’ll be right back creating the sound of salvation.

Are you excited? We are.

God bless you, one and all!

Jon Richards

P.S. In other news the new Soteria Magazine is out talking about being “FRESH”.

For the first time in what seems like an age I’ve written a piece of music. Having been caught up so much in the last few years in publishing other people’s writings I’ve really not done much of my own. However this week Kitty asked me to compose a theme tune for her video project and while I was at it I thought I’d better write down the words to a rap that has been kicking around my head for ages.

Phil Gray and I have talked about recording some of mine and his songs this year so hopefully between that and a new youth band project we should really increase the amount of material availible on S:WMD over the next year, God willing.

With a slight tinge of sadness it turns out my assistant at work will be leaving today as he prepares to go to university. Dan, we all wish you well in your studies and thanks for all the excellent work.

Onwards an upwards, for Jesus’ glory.

God bless you

Jon Richards

Being a bit of a Cornish ‘stay-at-home’ I’ve never been to an alpine ski resort, and the only snow I’ve ever really seen is the very damp snow we sometimes get. Yet this year with the ridiculously cold temperatures that have been happening all over Europe we have had dry snow fall yesterday.

I arrived at work in Truro at 8:05am yesterday; my VW Polo had no trouble climbing the hill to get there. I duly went inside and started to make myself useful. About 10 minutes later I happened to walk past a window and saw that two inches of dry snow had fallen!

I ran upstairs for a better view of what was happening only to find that Truro had disappeared behind a snow flurry so think that you simply could not see through it.

Now while this did look nice and pretty, and work was eventually cancelled for the day, we did have a problem. Some kids had been sledging on the hill, which had compacted down into ice. We were stuck. Just like back in November 2005, although cars can drive through Truro we could not drive them down the hill. Apparently a Range Rover struggled to go down it so my Polo would have been dead-meat!

You see the problem is not the ice itself, the problem is that the hill ends on a T-junction with a major route, and on the opposite side of that is the solid concrete wall of the police yard! Not a wall to go crashing into because, 1. even if you survived it your car and the wall would not, and 2. you’d never get away with it. So I was left with just one option of how to get home…walk!

This journey would be about 7 miles, with a mixture of up and down hill slopes, through 3 inches of snow, and it transpired two blizzards so thick that I could not really see where I was going! Mercifully there wasn’t any wind so the snow was just literally falling.

About 4 miles into my journey, I’m in a place with the hilarious sounding name of “Greenbottom” (one of the hamlets between Redruth and Truro). Finally from behind me appears a number 14 bus! I flag the bus down, and the driver gratefully received me aboard his completely empty bus! He informed me that he was one of the first bus trips to be released from the station today and although the time was 12:30pm this particular bus was actually the 9:05am service!

By one o’clock I was back at home with some piping hot chicken soup, still a bit cold but warming up. So alls well that ends well.

Enjoy the snow everybody

God bless

Jon Richards

As you might have guessed by the lack of posts to this blog; things have calmed down a bit now since Christmas.

So now that the festivities are finished, 2010 has started, and we’ve all enjoyed a good break I thought I’d be in for a busy time going back to work at Truro School, and so it was for the first two days, today however the school has closed due to the snow. So not quite as busy as I would of expected.

Still, it suddenly means that Kitty and I were able to do a bit of filming at the local goldfish shop for her university project and I’ve spent the afternoon catching up with editing and publishing the rather large backlog of RBC sermons from the last two months. My apologies to all listeners of the RBC Listen Again service for getting so behind with these over Christmas.

From what I can foresee I think January is likely to be quite a quiet month as far as S:WMD business is concerned, which after the last three months of extreme busyness is a welcome break. Soteria Mag however is almost ready for it’s next publication so watch out for that one.

So if you will indulge me, I’d like to use the rest of this blog entry for what blogs are for: posting random musings:

The other day I walked from my house into Redruth that means having to pass through the local of “Mount Ambrose”. As the name implies this is a relatively steep climb. As I was walking a line of a Matt Redman song came into my head:
“I’m climbing up the mountain of the Lord, toward your Holy Place, and every step is praise!”

I began to wonder can you really praise God with every step? Then is dawned on me that there could well be bases for this idea. In the NIV translation, under the title of each Psalm is usually a note about the Psalm and who wrote it. Some of these notes indicate that certain Psalms are called ‘Psalms of Ascents’. The idea went something like this:

In Jewish understanding worship does not start after you arrive at the temple and the worship leader tells you that the service is about to start. The journey of getting there was all a part of the Jewish worship experience. The temple in Jerusalem was built on the foundation “Temple Mount” a huge stone structure able to withstand the weight of such a large building. To get up to the temple these were many steps and each was rather large, it was not a staircase that you could hurry up even if you wanted to. So to focus the mind on worshipping God the Psalmists gave the people ‘Psalms of Ascents’ to praise God with while on the way up to the Temple. You would stop on each step, read one of these Psalms perhaps with an additional prayer, and then on to the next step.

They are literally Psalms to be read as you ascend to worship God!

My Church is actually down hill from my house and it sits at ground level, but I see no reason why I can’t have a good worship music CD going while I’m travelling there. That way when I arrive I will already be in the frame of mind to worship my Lord and Saviour.

Indeed, if I were to walk the couple of miles that it is to worship my God with my fellow believers, perhaps I should be reading aloud a Psalm of Ascent. Who’s brave enough for that one?

Happy new year to you all

God bless

Jon Richards