Have you ever been still...just quiet and still...and listened to the music?
My life has been permeated with music throughout its entirety. One of my earliest memories of music is sitting on my grandpa's lap in the choir seating while he sang a swinging tenor and pointed out the words and notes for me to follow along. I would beg my mom to let me sit in the choir seating with him on Sundays while the choir sang just so I could be up front and singing with my Dee-boy. My parents and grand parents encouraged me from a young age to sing in church and my mom taught us songs that little ones remember easily during sunday school that I would repeat during church, with no fear of rejection by my church family. They were always delighted to see the curly haired little girl, standing on the stage, singing about Jesus.
In my teenage years I had aspirations of being a famous country music singer, and believe me, I had the twang to go with it. When I was older my voice coach would cringe and tell me to, "Stop with the Tammy," referring to Tammy Wynette, a beautiful singer in my opinion, but definitely without the training my coach was trying to instill in me.
Throughout high school and college I sang in Latin, Italian, German, Spanish, and occasionally in English, though it is not viewed as "high brow" as foreign languages in the competitive settings. My coach would sing the assigned songs or play the CD of the demonstrations and I would always try my absolute hardest to mirror their every inflection, facial expression, and movement to convey the feeling of the songs.
Now that I am older (a whole whopping 24) I am a worship leader in my church. I am given the responsibility of picking out the songs for our Sunday Worship service, making sure we practice as a band, and then working with the band to lead our congregation in worship. Think it's simple? Cuz it's not....
You see, throughout my ENTIRE life of music I have been merely a reflection. Nothing even close to the real thing. I have always been dissatisfied with it too. I have been told before to "find my own voice" and make a song my own, but I have never been able to truly let the images and sounds of what a song is "supposed" to sound like leave me long enough to make it my own.
While I have always seen this as a terrible curse and that something is wrong with me I have come to realize why I have been made this way...and I am no longer fighting it.
My job is not to break the mold. My job is not to blaze new trails, create my own music, and be different. My job is to be a mirror. My job is to be the moon. My problem in life has not been that I am only a reflection, my problem is that I have been pointed in the wrong direction. I have been pointed at an artist, a song, a style of music, and all of these things fall incredibly short of what I am supposed to be pointed at.
I have a great desire to be pointed in the right direction. I want to reflect what God is. I want to show people what God looks like. Music is a gift to us all. There is power in music, as though the God has given humanity an inner pulse that beats only with the rhythmic cadence of a song. It's a force that flows through us to other people.
I have said that Sundays are exhausting because God's presence is more that a body should endure. Our bodies were not made for such glory. But something I heard the other day stays with me. We are not bodies with a soul. We are a soul with a body. Our souls are all given a gift when we become Children but I really think that God gives it to us as infants - we're just not able to truly tap into it until we can truly tap into Him. My gift was music. It is not only His gift to me, but my gift to Him. I want to sing for One who loves me, the greatest love song I can give - the song of my own life. I only hope that it pleases Him.
DV
"I want to sit at Your feet/ Drink from the cup in Your hand/ Lay back against You and breathe/ Feel Your heart beat./ This love is so deep/ It's more than I can stand./ I melt in Your peace/ It's overwhelming." -Kari Jobe
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