BROADCASTS.com

b'

\\xa0Dream Word \\u2013\\xa0HAPPY

Ephesians 5:19\\xa0\\u2026..speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord\\u2026.NKJV

Many evenings, my wife and I take an hour\\u2019s walk together. It is always good to walk in the Kentucky countryside, past all the entrances to the 'hollers' where the blacktop ends, and up amongst the brush and on the green hillsides, which are sometimes speckled with light blue cornflowers, or sometimes freckled with the rich, red leaves of disrobing hardwood trees getting ready to go to sleep for winter in the pumpkin orange of the that Kentucky earth\\u2019s, chubby, child-like cheeks, all full of falls-fatness at winter's beckoning bedtime. Here, you can see the cold, angle-ironed markers, still stuck upright in the 'dark and bloody ground.' These property markers might be in the right legal place, but they are completely out of place amongst this singing beauty, standing rusty and uncamouflaged amongst the fantastic foliage, sometimes flagged with pink fluorescent plastic ribbons, but all shouting out the various property lines of a people proud to own a piece of American pie. Yup, personal real estate is especially important in Kentucky. The rusted poles of old angle-iron might be more permanent than the old wooden staves previously used in history to mark out land, but still, they are rather unsightly.

My hometown, over a thousand years ago, was once an Anglo-Saxon settlement in the center of a meadow which they called a \\u2018Lea.\\u2019 Records show that some sixty acres of this \\u2018Lea\\u2019-land' had already been marked off by wooden staves and designated for a new town area. After the battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror gave this same area of\\xa0 'Stave-Lea,' (Staveley as it is now known) as a victory present to one his warriors. The Normans had finally arrived in my hometown.

The family of that warrior, \\u2018Ascuit Musard,\\u2019 held Staveley for generations until the death of Nicholas Musard, a Roman Catholic priest, who, because he could not legally leave his land to his bastard children, (no change there then in a thousand years,) had his property dispersed among his sisters, one of whom married \\u2018Anker De Frechville, Baron of Crich.\\u2019 Now, the Frechville\\u2019s really left their mark on Staveley in the form of the old and well haunted Hagge farm, The Manor house, The Rectory and of course, a Chantry, some parts of which date back to the thirteenth century, well before the ownership and sponsorship of the Frechville family.

A Chantry is a private chapel, where a priest sang or chanted psalms for the soul of the founder. The religious rich have always had their spiritual insurance policies, paying those they believed to have the ear of God to intercede with singing on their behalf while they just got on with the sinning. A Chantry was such a place, a place of paid private prayer, a place of praise, and of supplication for the person who had enough money in his wallet to make it so. Even so,\\xa0 I tell you tonight, that I like the idea of a Chantry. I like the idea of a private place of singing psalms and chanting some choice songs of the spirit.

Today in his devotional \\u2018My Utmost for His Highest,\\u2019 Oswald Chambers, from a speech to Theological students says, \\u201cIt is not the practical activities that are the strength of this Bible Training College \\u2013 it\\u2019s entire strength lies in the fact that here you are immersed in the truths of God to soak in them before Him. You have no idea of where or how God is going to engineer your future circumstances and no knowledge of what stress and strain is going to be placed on you either at home or abroad. And if you waste your time in overactivity, instead of being immersed in the great fundamental truths of God\\u2019s redemption, then you will snap when the stress and strain do come.\\u201d