This is the final blog entry inspired by the 2014 tour of the Living Proof Youth Choir (LPYC) of Christ UMC in Plano, Texas. It isn’t meant to be a summary of the tour, but a set of reflections prompted by events on the trip.
I wanted to blog and figured if choir tour didn’t give me enough material, then nothing could, so I challenged myself to write an entry per day. OK, I fudged it a little by combining some days, but I had good reasons. Here we come to the last entry for choir tour – but not for the blog!
Enough time has passed that any emotional high I got from the trip has been beaten back into submission by everyday life, which makes it a good time to add some final remarks.
The one-word sermon for this trip would have to be connections. You can tell from the previous entries that the music provided a common ground for the choir to make connections with people who didn’t live in their everyday world. If New Kingdom Church can feel like family, if you can share stories with the people at Breakthrough Ministries, if you can hold the shaking hand of an elderly woman and tell her about your school, you’ve made connections.
The final stop on tour is our own church. The choir sings for the three worship services we have in the sanctuary. The congregation is parents, siblings, and friends, but there’s still the challenge of connecting.
We did our final devotional while on the road back to Plano. Our group’s discussion moved from the devotional to that very challenge. How can we communicate to the people at home what kind of week we had? I could tell a difference in their singing as the week passed. Those songs had people and stories attached to them and singing was a way to reconnect with those people and those stories. It’s the step beyond owning the message: the message owns you.
This was not just the last stop on the tour. Trey, the director, was leaving our church to move back to Alabama. For the past three years Trey has been a director, example, mentor, friend, coach, resource, you-name-it for the youth in this choir. Trey would do anything for these youth and they would do anything for him. (He also writes a very good blog.)
So they sang the three services. The congregation loved the music, as we knew they would. The video told some of the stories from the tour. For the third service, the chaperones made the congregation stand and clap for Praise His Holy Name, just to try to capture that feeling.
Then it came time for that last song at the last service and the last time Trey would lead the choir. This was about more than the last week, it was about the last three years. How do you get through a song that means goodbye? You do it by connecting. As Trey stepped up to direct, the singers on the front row joined hands, followed by the second row, then the next and the next. Our connections make us stronger. As we made those connections outside ourselves, it became easier to make those connections between ourselves. It’s hard to wipe your eyes when you’re holding hands, but the choir managed to cry, sing, and hold hands all at once.
Trey thanked the congregation, stepped back to the choir and fell into the largest group hug I’ve ever seen.
I don’t think the choir could have shown the congregation everything they experienced that week, but that moment said a lot.
I began this series with a challenge to myself, so let me end it with a challenge to you. There are really only two things God wants you to do: to love and serve God and to love and serve your neighbor. It’s a short and difficult list, but when you’re doing it, you realize that this is Reality. I believe for a week this past July, the Living Proof Youth Choir did it as well as fallible humans can. The challenge is to bring Reality into your everyday lives. You start by connecting.
The Feral Deacon 