Passed

So, I passed my recital hearing. The joke is that now I get to stop practicing, but in reality it seems like nothing has actually changed. I still have to worry about trying to get people to dress rehearsals, makign sure everything is still memorized, coordinating dates, email-ing people...It never seems to end. I will be really happy when March 22nd at around 4 p.m. rolls around. It will actually be a bittersweet sort of thing because I am to the place now where I am actually invested in the music. I used to dread my French set, but now I am starting to connect with the texts and the music in new ways. I love the entire program, and I am excited for people to hear it.

We leave for tour in a little over a day now. This is only my second choir tour, but (now that I type this I think I already said this exact same thing) I am mega-pumped. I dwindled my to-do list down as far as I could before we leave so I don't have a bunch of stuff hanging over my head the whole time. Granted, there will be some stuff, but it should be a nice relaxing time. I am a little jealous of the people I hear who are taking trips to the Carolinas or Florida. I miss the warm weather. Hopefully we'll be following it as it moves east.

This semester has really made me start thinking more deeply about worship for a number of reasons; I am in my music ministry class, I got to attend the Calvin Symposium on Worship, I'm still working out what SNW should be like, etc. I am reading a book by one of my recently founded new favorite authors, Marva Dawn. She writes from a pretty reformed/conservative Lutheran background, and it makes it seem like all she writes about worship is in favor of traditionalism, but she is really pushing me to think more deeply about what worship really ought to be. She has helped open my eyes to the ways in which our worship has become neither for God or about God in big and subtle ways. She has challenged me to think of how the good news of Christ should form us in everything we do.

In a way this pushing has caused some discontent in my life. I sat through a Chapel service today and just felt frustrated most of the time because I didn't feel like what was happening was actually worship. There were so many little things that caught my attention enough that they pulled me away from doing what Dawn would say is true worship and "royally wasting" my time in the glory of God. Maybe I was just discontent because the day before there had been an Ash Wednesday service that I was able to connect with on a deep level and I had hoped that the season of Lent might be marked by more such reflective worship experiences. I know that I am not on the Chapel planning committee so I have no right to "complain", but these things are helping me to think more critically about the worship services that I do help plan.

I'll leave you with just something to mull over: One of the resources I have been reading talked about thinking critically about the words we actually say within worship and how they can get in the way. One of their critiques of many services was specifically of the first words used. Do they always have to be "good morning"? What sort of atmosphere would it create if we stopped utilizing colloquial greetings and jumped right into worship by hearing God's revelation to us through scripture? In short, how are the first words of a worship service setting the tone for the rest of the service?