Canter Bridge

On an Indianapolis afternoon when it seems as though Spring my have decisively wrenched the world from Winter’s icy grip, human need runs deep in the streets. As in this poor man’s heart.

iTunes, as is parroted in the way that becomes truisms with their undeniable kernel of truth, has changed the way we listen to music. And talk and sermons.

So does this battered survivor’s heart find itself caressed this afternoon by the alleged randomness of iTunes as it works its way via its own inscrutable logic through my embarrassingly bulging iTunes library.

Old friend Mark Mitchell, pastor and pulpiteer of the Bay Area’s incomparable Central Peninsula Church, holds fast for the benefit of both heart and mind on the eighth chapter of the enigmatic biblical book we call Ecclesiastes. Mark delivered this soul food long ago, on a morning when a then President Bush was contemplating going to war with Iraq. Today I live—we live—in a different world. Yet bread well broken continues to nourish the hungriness within. And without.

I did not choose Mark’s life-mongering words today. They came to me, an unsolicited gift, courtesy of iTunes’ serendipity. Just in time.

Where else is such sweetness, such life, to be found?

And then another old friend, the irrefutably odd Dr. Kelly Liebengood comes on, drooling the words to his obtuse but charming ‘Deep With You‘.

In all of this, a heart is elevated, a mind set fire.

Is iTunes random?

Is anything random?

Perhaps, in a matter of speaking.

In a world governed by Holy Love, not at all.