Singing Along the Journey
Thoughts about faith and wholeness set to the soundtrack of life

A little preview of “Music for Good Friday”…

Our Music for Good Friday program  is called “Pardon our Dust: Remembrance”, because, by performing the work of one composer, we remember the life and music of another, as we also remember this night and its meaning in the Christian observance of Holy Week. There are very fine scholars in this world who devote their lives to the study of composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and his music, and I will tell you, before I continue, that I am not one of them.  But as I began to look for music for this, our fourth “Music for Good Friday” concert, I wanted to find a different text other than the…
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Something I’ve learned about my voice…

I am well known for loving the part of the church year known as Lent.    Partly, I love it because it is a great excuse to do what I like to do most anyway....read, study, pray, and think about the meaning of life.  I love a chance to remember my human condition, to think about all the ways in which my faith has helped me survive and thrive despite that human condition, all the ways in which a better understanding of that human condition can help me communicate the good news to others...   But to tell you the truth,  one of the big reasons that Lent is my favorite season of the…
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Life is all about showing up….or not

I think I have over the past few days come to a finer understanding of just what it means to show up for your life.  And, as usual, I’ve learned it the hard way. If you’ve been reading anything that I’ve written here over the past year, you probably know by now that I have been struggling about issues like the relationship between faith and musical performance, and what that means in my life – opera, only sacred music, only singing at church, or quitting altogether. And you probably know that around the time I had my baptism in December, I realized that the call to a ministry through music…
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Thank you, Snowmageddon

Anyone who know me knows that I am not a fan of winter.  And I am especially NOT a member of the snow fan club.  So I guess this winter,  the joke is on me. My dislike for snow apparently started early in life, according to an old family story.  At the tender age of 2, it is told that I was desperate to accompany my teenage brother out onto the grounds of our farm when he went to shovel a path to the chicken house during one particularly bad Missouri blizzard.  My mother lovingly wrapped me in every piece of warm clothing that she could find, zipped up my…
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Yes, Lord, I guess I really did hear you correctly…

Last Sunday, I was baptized.  It's not that I had not been baptized, I had.  And it was not that I had not been baptized as an "adult", because I was 12 at the time of my first baptism. But during the course of our preaching class this fall, we read parts of Barbara Brown Taylor's The Preaching Life.  In that book, she talks about how the preacher is really just someone that a community has decided to support in their full-time study of the Gospel, so that that person can act as a conduit between the community and God.  And part of that job is for the preacher to…
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Yes, I’m going to Germany…to buy socks

I just booked the ticket for a few days at the German Christmas Markets between the end of my holiday concert season and the actual holidays and I'm really quite excited...I get to buy new socks. I won't waste your time listing the virtues of German-made socks (a very long list, mind you),  or enter into a discussion about why the people in a country where many are happy to sun bathe nude in public parks make the very finest socks.   Let it suffice to say that, for the past several weeks, it's not Carolina that's on my mind....its Germany. There are a variety of reasons that I am suffering…
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Well, who would have thought…

First my apologies...I've been away and distracted by other things.   I've started and stop more posts than I care to admit, and I really will finish them.  Someday. But if you followed the earlier entries in my blog, you know that I've been doing a lot of soul-searching about music and faith and how best to roll these two together into a life of meaning -- well, one of the things that I have done is to participate in a preaching class offered by my pastor.  And, last night, I preached my first ever sermon. So, rather than write more about this experience and what it means in the greater…
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An Audience of One

So, I'll admit it -- I have been procrastinating.  I typed this title and saved an empty page as "Draft" months  ago, after I read the  chapter by the same title in Os Guinness's book Rise to the Call.  Maybe I believed that if I thought about it for a while, the  feeling that my head would simply explode at the concept might subside. It did not.   But I read the chapter again yesterday, and I didn't explode, so now I think that I am ready to write. Guiness's term, "an audience of One", should really be a simple concept relating to call and motivation. But nothing is really simple when it relates to a…
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Learning to say NO

Well, maybe not NO, just no -- but clearly and without hesitation, and not in a panic at the last minute. Lillian Nordica, a famous American opera singer of the Gilded Age, wrote in her "Hints to Singers" (appended posthumously to her biography, Yankee Diva, written by Ira Glackens in 1963), that a career is built more upon the "no's" than the "yes's".  And I have long pondered that dictum, even if I didn't put it into practice. For years, as I worked day and night to build my singing career, if someone asked, I said yes.  [caption id="attachment_53" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Lillian Nordica"][/caption] But several years ago, I started to observe…
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Why I became a Baptist…

As we moved through the worship experience of Palm Sunday last week at Calvary Baptist Church, I couldn't help but think back to the year before.  In 2008, despite my two years of service in the music department there, I had not yet become a full, card-carrying (well, we really don't have cards) member of the congregation.  No one had ever treated me as an outsider, no one had ever pressured me to join -- everyone I encountered had truly lived to their congregational mission of inclusion and acceptance. Yet, I had not yet joined the church. You would have had to know me for a long time to understand…
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