S04E063, Record Players and Joy, Andy B 2 Minute Video

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Music. It can move in pretty amazing ways, and God designed, and hand made us, to be able to enjoy music.

Vinyl records were once at the height of technology for listening to music at home. Later CDs took over, and now digital music is streamed to us in better quality than those discs we used to play on record players.

With advancing technology we can see improvements. But I’m always reminded that because we can doesn’t mean to say we should. Likewise, just because we think something is better, it doesn’t mean it is.

Electric cars are amazing technological devices that produce almost no emission when being driven on the roads. But they consume vast amounts of resources to be created in the first place; their batteries use precious resources often being mined at  the hands of child labour in developing countries. Also, as much as a battery creates clean energy, generating that energy is anything but clean!

While these new ways of creating energy may be seen as good, there is a wider picture we need to consider before we consider something actually good or not, or an improvement or not. For example, a pencil and a piece of paper can’t crash and don’t need updating or charging. Just sayin…

In the same way it’s easy to walk into a church, see ways of doing things that we consider to be antiquated, old fashioned or just plain out of date! And yet those same systems have sustained churches for an awfully long time, long before we arrived.

The phrase ‘don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater’ comes from multiple people using the water of a bath to get clean. Over time that water could become so dark and dirty, that you could literally lose a baby in the bath, and risk having the baby thrown away with the dirty water when everybody had finished.

Let’s not be too hasty to throw away what we consider to be past its sell by date. Much like vinyl, which is making quite a comeback, we need to see the wider view - because vinyl brings much joy to many, without any digital devices being used, and has done for many years and will for many more years to come!

Just a thought...

Andy B

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Transcript

0:01
Record Players and Joy. That's my Andy B 2 Minute Video this time because, chatting with a friend Alan, we were talking a little bit about music. And he was saying how much he enjoys his record player, and playing his vinyl records.

0:14
When CDs came in, I remember somebody brought 'em into the school I was in at the time. I was about 17 years old. 'Oh, look at this, this is one of those newfangled CDs, it's amazing. You can scratch it, it still works'. One of us volunteered to scratch on a brick wall and test it, and he wouldn't let us do that for some reason.

0:31
It's really easy, isn't it to look old and think it's bad, and it's out of date. And see something that's new and you think well it's new, therefore, it must be good. But just because we can doesn't mean to say we should. And just because something's old doesn't mean to say it's antiquated, or bad. The Bible is 2,000 years going back to Jesus, and it's about 6, 7,000 years old and altogether. That's how old the world, our world is. It's amazing! It's not out of date, still absolutely as relevant and as current today, as it was when it was written 1,000s of years ago, 2,000 years ago.

1:02
It's really easy to throw out the old and to want to switch to the new. But let's not throw out the old because what's old can be really valuable, and really have lots of richness, and depth, that we desperately need.

1:17
Records can bring joy, why? Because they sound very authentic. It's how it was meant to be 40 years ago, and you get that sound and that experience. I don't have a record player, I have CDs, or mp3 or Spotify or wherever. But I like a record. It's got a nice richness to it.

1:35
You can look at a vinyl and think well, it's got scratches and grooves and they get dirty, and dusty, and greasy, and it doesn't play so well, and it degrades over time. And yeah, but the technology of records is still fairly amazing. They still sound very, very good!

1:48
So, let's not throw out the old in favour of the new. It's really easy to think that it's new, therefore it's better, and it's old, therefore it's not. But God doesn't see us as old, or new. Gods see us as His children whom he loves.

2:01
Let's not throw out what's old just because it's old.

2:03
Just a thought.