Here's a piece to bless you: The Song of the Mountains. There is something about mountains that draws our hearts upward and onward – and how we long to go higher and meet the Lord on the mountain!
The starting thought that inspired me to write this piece was a picture I had in my mind of a community gathering together in the High French Pyrenees, caught up in joyous worship before the Lord. I often find that what I 'imagine' in such ways turns out to have some basis in reality. When I dug deeper, I discovered that there was indeed a period towards the end of the nineteenth century, when people had expressed their faith deeply in the region.
Being a lover of the recorder, I wrote the most prominent parts for Julia and Thomas Herzog. You will also hear Nicola Gerard alternating between flute and piccolo, with Heather Bradley on violin, Natalie Halliday on cello, with her father, Mike, conducting, and – as the piece is set in France – Sally Prittie playing the keyboard on an accordion setting!
May this light and airy piece bring joy and brightness into your day today, and help us to be caught up with Him in worship that touches both our heart and our mind. And let's pray for the time when villagers in one region after another across our continent lift their hearts and respond to the Lord Jesus’s invitation to ‘Come further up, and further in,’ so that we can keep our eyes fixed on Him, and know still more of the height and depth of His love, as well as its length and width as well! As we do so may He keep our hearts free from any tendency to disparage ourselves, or to look down on others, but rather to see in them more of His beauty and breath of life, so that together we may worship in the fullness of joy.