Since we are now looking at an Easter where no church gatherings will take place – can you imagine … well, yes you can – it will do us well to consider the power of the gospel, even when we cannot celebrate it to the fullest extent.
Please think about this for a moment:
The gospel
Whether we teach adolescents in public school, private school, church, within the larger community, or perhaps a combination of these, the good news of the gospel provides energy as nothing else can. The power of love to transform lives, to uplift, to enrich, and to experience Christ-empowered acceptance happens every day in school choral halls as well as on weekends in church rehearsal spaces. Whether or not your teaching place allows “religion” or not, we are all free to love our students as Christ loves.
The greatest art
I submit that music is the greatest art and choral music is perhaps the highest form of music. My reasoning in saying that has to do with a very practical consideration: participation. Not everyone has the gift to be a great sculptor, a fine architect, a good painter, a patient potter, or a stunning dancer. A few more may learn to play the organ, strings, wind instruments, or percussion. A few more still may study piano. Singing, on the other hand, can be universal. To be sure, some sing with more training and skill than others, but singing seems innate for most people. Many toddlers beginning singing before they learn to walk or talk, and many more as they learn to speak. As we mature, choral music brings us together to form deep communities with beautiful sounds. It’s an astonishing phenomenon!
Holy Week 2019 should remind us
Palm Sunday last year began with one of the greatest comebacks in sports history. Tiger Woods, coming back from more than a decade of failure, family chaos, addiction, injuries, and a career over the cliff, experienced his own version of Easter. How dare we compare an earthly sports comeback to the Resurrection of Jesus? Given, the former is a pale, miniscule comparison to the latter, but let’s not be too quick to rule out the divine comparisons to our everyday lives. Please consider that God is the Author of all good things reborn, the One who empowers all of us to persevere in the pursuit of personal excellence, Who provides us the courage to push through failure after failure to reach worthwhile, inspired and inspiring goals.
The Tiger comeback was complete on Palm Sunday. Less than twenty-four hours later, Notre-Dame Cathedral caught fire. And now, less than a year later, we are all facing a worldwide pandemic. As we celebrate the resurrection “virtually” this Easter, let us pray that God-breathed resurrections might bless us in every area of our lives, personally, churchwide, nationally, internationally. May God resurrect a sense of kindness, gentleness, compassion, and love inside all of us!
I have no idea where you are personally and with the group(s) you lead. You may be excited and can’t wait to get started teaching again when this epidemic is past. On the other hand, you may be dreading to the point of depression having to try to upstart leadership in a difficult situation or within a less-than-friendly administration or church staff. Or, perhaps, you are somewhere in between, neither totally dreading nor terribly excited.
Whoever we are and whatever our state of mind, we all need a certain amount of comeback strength. I’d like to lovingly encourage you and remind you that that you can do it. Keep working. Keep preparing. Keep praying. And keep loving. The comeback we seek is only a matter of time.
Randy Edwards
