RONAN KEATING; A PROPHET TO MY SOUL???!!!

Sat 26 Jul 2003

The next Stocki on Life contribution to Irish magazine Faith For Life is the first and last time he hopes he has to feature Ronan Keating. With a title like this though you gotta be intrigued...

RONAN KEATING; A PROPHET TO MY SOUL????!!!!!

Okay. I need to make a confession before I get to the point. I was at a Ronan Keating concert! Now let me explain how the devil tempted me. I was in Cape Town with twenty five students. We needed a night out and students are not as snobby about pop music as I was! A friend was playing guitar with Mr. Keating. Anyway, now that that is off my chest here is the real burden of my soul. Not much of what Ronan did was very memorable. A couple of wedding band covers especially that east Belfast folk song Brown Eyed Girl kept us awake but another one, In The Ghetto, made famous by Elvis had me losing sleep.

This was one of Elvis’s finest moments though it was Martyn Joseph’s version that eked out its powerful sadness and poignancy for me. A young boy born on the wrong side of the tracks becomes a victim of the criminal world and his mother mourns his doom. The sympathy is with the boy. We are angry that this big old bad world could suck out his innocence and destroy his life. Tonight it clashed with the events of the previous night. Less than twenty four hours earlier we were broken into and two of the students had clothes and valuables stolen. As we looked tenderly at the vicious world that destroys young men into such acts and how as Christians we need to show a Godlike mercy and forgiveness to those trapped in such circumstances the other side of us was reeking revenge and near praying divine judgement on the perpetrators of our own theft.

Where sentimentality and reality meet is a hard place for the soul to settle. And so is the place where the stark events of this fallen world and the ideals of our following of Jesus intersect. Do we really believe what we believe or do we just respond like everyone else? I guess this was one of the reasons that Jesus warned us that following him would mean a daily taking up of our cross. This sojourn in the wake of Jesus lead, constantly clashes our feelings with the Kingdom actions that fly in the face of natural response. We die to self in order to live out the upside down kingdom that Christ blueprinted when he walked among us. This is where grace stops being a doctrine to die for and becomes a radical revolution to live for!

Who would have thought it? Ronan Keating a prophet to my soul! Mysterious ways indeed.