Music Testimony

written for adult choir at my church; each week someone is featured on the back of the rehearsal notes, for a getting-to-know-you kind of thing.


I grew up attending Liberty Manor Baptist, in Liberty, where my mom plays the piano and my dad sings in the choir. Music was never a choice for me—it’s my default setting. I mean, as small children my brother and I played with Mr. Potato Heads under the piano while my mom gave lessons.

I started taking piano lessons from my mom the summer before kindergarten. I switched to violin in fifth grade—piano skips a generation, I’ve heard?—and was involved in school orchestra, choir, and musicals for the rest of my Liberty career.

Meanwhile, I’d given my life to Christ as a child and I joined church choir in eighth or ninth grade. After some personnel upheaval, I found myself called to be interim minister of music for six months when I was sixteen. It was inevitable, really; both my parents had done it in the past! Although I had little responsibility beyond leading music on Sunday mornings, the ministry role was a tremendous opportunity for me to serve my church and the Lord at a young age.

My personal definition of music as worship occurred around that time. My school choir sang a gorgeous arrangement of “How Can I Keep from Singing?” I know it’s incredibly cliché, but that’s exactly what it is for me—how could I not? “No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I’m clinging; since I believe that love abides how can I keep from singing?” Or, for an alternative perspective on the theme, “if every tongue were still the noise would still continue, the rocks and stones themselves would start to sing!” (Jesus Christ Superstar paraphrase of Luke 19:40.)

I moved to Springfield for college and soon thereafter started attending FBC. Nowadays I help with Children’s Choir, play in the orchestra, and hang out here in choir, of course. While I never could have done music as a career—um, the reason Mom quit giving me piano lessons was because I have a tendency not to practice—it is as natural a part of my life as laughing. And praise God for giving us so much to sing about—honestly, how could I keep from singing?

Signs

Signs I am nowhere near ready to have kids, #194:

When I get home from a day at work, if I feel like eating dinner and watching tv rather than playing with Jonesie, I do it. I completely ignore him to focus on my superficial desires.

dammit

Remind me to try, sometime, engaging in a normal relationship with a male. "Normal" defined-as-but-not-limited-to:
-not a one-night stand
-a guy I actually like
-not an icon guy
-not a guy fresh out of a serious relationship

bob lawblaw

I'm pretty sure time is cyclical. The coincidences aren't coincidences; they're just history repeating itself. It's not even that I make the same mistakes, not even that things end up the same way, it's just...

If you catch me off guard, sometimes I don't know what season it is, let alone month or year.

I swear the nineties weren't that long ago. I mean, "1999" sounds fairly recent to me. But it's not. At all. I was twelve. God. Throughout my teenagerdom I regarded twelve, for some arbitrary reason, as the time I started thinking like an adult. That my consciousness was really "me." Maybe because I don't remember much before then? Maybe because I had no friends before then? Maybe because that's when sex ed was? haha.

Obviously my thinking and my experience is altogether different after a decade.

Time just seems so relative. Things that happened 36 hours ago barely remain in my consciousness, while I'm all, "holy shit, my student was born in 2003 and is six years old, no way, 2003 was way too recent for that." A guy from a year and a half ago is on my mind way more than any of the guys since then. Harry Potter still seems novel, while Star Wars feels like ancient history.

lol.

I know this doesn't make sense.

And then I wonder how something as permanent as marriage could even be in the cards for me at all? Because I have pretty successfully severed feelings and commitment from just plain lust. I don't know how to turn that back on. and right now I don't WANT to. Yet while out in public recently, I saw a cute little family and was hit with a wave of "oh my god I want a husband and kids NOW," hahaha.

Meanwhile it all repeats, repeats, repeats.

The same comments, the same compliments, the same awkwardness, it's all the same...

For a novelty, though, at this very moment my pet rat is stuck in my trash can!