Hymns: 2008 Memories

2008

In 2008, Smyth’s toy shop in Henry Street Limerick closed. I was sorry to see it go. We regularly visited it with the children over the years, and I’m sure that I purchased a few computer games there myself. I was surprised to see the large building taken over by the Abundant Life Christian fellowship a few years later.

I think I first discovered the Unbelievable podcast in late 2008. It’s been running for many years.

Hymns/worship songs from 2008 include the following. I’m only just getting familiar with newer hymns, and I could only find two that were published in 2008. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell when exactly they were published. I really need to think about changing the title of this series and maybe drop the word “hymns” altogether”. But it’s good to alert people that it contains spiritual content – just in case spiritual things upset them 😀.

I remember reading Reinventing English Evangelicalism in 2008, but I don’t remember anything about it. I’ll have to read it again 😀. Another book that I read in 2008 was The Courage to Be Protestant by David Wells. He basically expressed unease about the different directions that modern “trendy” evangelicalism is taking and argued that we should just be Protestant. He has no love for the modernist/liberal Protestants. I suppose he simply meant traditional conservative evangelicalism. I “sort of” agree with him, but I don’t think that we should generalize too much about movements. It’s not a case of all people in one movement being silly and all people in another movement being sensible. You can get fine people in many of the modern “trendy” churches, and you can get silly or bossy people in the more conservative churches. It’s just like society at large, but you tend to get a higher proportion of annoying people in serious-minded religious or political groups. Maybe they go there because they can’t find friends anywhere else 😀.

So, if I were moving to a new town, I would check out the evangelical churches, I wouldn’t automatically attend one merely because it had a specific label on it or whatever. I would avoid silly ones or anti-intellectual ones or churches that are cult-like and try to excessively control people’s views on secondary issues. But I’d also avoid churches that don’t take the Bible seriously. In Ireland, I like Baptist churches. They’re generally quite balanced. But there are many other evangelical churches that are quite similar. And there are silly ones too 😀. But some people prefer the silly ones.

I remember us studying the Bible books of Jeremiah and James in Tipperary. And we started using the Christian Hymns hymn book in addition to Mission Praise. What I liked about Christian Hymns was that a DVD was available with all the tunes. I used to play the keyboard in Tipperary as well as speak, but I was never good at reading music. I generally played by ear. It’s even better nowadays because there’s this Christian Hymns app that you can get on your phone that contains all the tunes. It also has a section on all the Psalms put the music. It’s free, but if you pay a small amount, you get access to modern hymns, which are copyrighted. It was just a few euro.

As I’ve mentioned before, sometimes my memories of the past are more vivid than recent years. I think of 2008 as recent though it’s 17 years ago now 😀.

One thing I do tend to remember about every year are the holidays. In 2008, we brought the kids to London for the first time, staying at St Paul’s Youth Hostel. That was something that I was wanting to do for a good few years. We visited the Museum of London, the Imperial War Museum, the Tower of London, The Science and Natural History Museums and took day trips to Oxford and Cambridge.

Ireland had the worst Eurovision entry ever with Dustin the Turkey, Airbnb was founded, and Spotify and Google Chrome were launched. I remember spending many happy hours with my Apple iPod Touch. I never really bonded with smartphones, but I do like to use them for browsing the web and listening to music.

I remember 2008 being a particularly stressful year at work. And of course, there was the global financial crises, which hit Ireland hard over the next few years. It was announced that the Irish economy had officially entered recession in January 2008 for the first time since 1983.​ And the 68-metre Elysian building was completed in Cork as the tallest storeyed building in the Republic of Ireland.​ In my younger years, it was the Cork County Hall, which was near an outdoor swimming pool that we used to go to.

I often check out the secular music charts to see what songs had spiritual themes. Among the 2008 lot were Footprints in the Sand by Leona Lewis. I think it was more of a love song than a spiritual song, but it was influenced by the Footprints in the Sand poem, which speaks of how God is with you when you might not even realize it.

Anyway, here are some music, events, and films/TV shows that would have formed the background to 2008. I don’t necessarily endorse all the songs or films 😀.

10 Songs

• Chasing Pavements – Adel
• American Boy – Estelle
• Take a Bow – Rihanna
• Violet Hill – Coldplay
• Have You Made Up Your Mind – Paul Weller​
• Warwick Avenue​ – Duffy
• Viva la Vida – Coldplay
• Use Somebody – Kings of Leon
• The Promise – Girls Aloud
• If I were a Boy – Beyonce​

10 Events

• Barack Obama elected President
• Global financial crisis deepens
• Beijing Olympics
• Sichuan Earthquake in China killed over 88,000 people
• Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, resigned
• €4 Billion Wiped Off Irish Stock Exchange
• Irish voters rejected the Lisbon treaty
• George W. Bush had shoes thrown at him
• Innocent man gunned down because he looked like a gang target in Limerick
• Russia invades Georgia, triggering international condemnation

10 Films or TV Shows

• The Dark Knight
• WALL·E
• Iron Man
• Slumdog Millionaire
• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
• In Bruges
• Kung Fu Panda
• Frost/Nixon
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• Little Dorrit TV Show

10 Famous People Who Passed Away

• Paul Newman
• Isaac Hayes
• Ronnie Drew
• Bo Diddley
• Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
• Odetta
• Edmund Hillary
• Eartha Kitt
• Charlton Heston
• Richard Wright