Sing to the Lord

For a Sunday, it wasn’t off to a great start. We were all tired from our unplanned trip to Kansas City, and two of the kids didn’t feel good. During the forty-five minutes that we spent warming up the choir downstairs, I mediated half a dozen fights.

Afterward, I took the little ones to the nursery to find that the thermostat sat at a round sixty degrees, which didn’t end up mattering because no one ever showed up to volunteer. So I headed back to church with two cranky, tired, and somewhat sick children, to join my tired, cranky husband and my tired, cranky five-year-old who “hates church,” psyching myself up to lead a choir full of singers and instrumentalists who needed their fearless leaders to have a spiritually full tank. And as I walked, I repeated my mother’s words like a mantra, promising that change will come someday: When you girls were little, there were lots of Masses we didn’t get much out of.

And then, the faithful rose to the occasion. Rita took Nicholas and put him instantly to sleep. Amy took Julianna and kept her corralled and entertained. And the other 700 people who were gathered, waiting for us to lead them, opened their mouths and sang the roof off. And in that sound, I heard the voice of God.

Those of you in the pews every week…I don’t think you realize how your participation feeds us, the music ministry. On a day when you sit numbly, too tired or unmotivated or grumpy to open your mouths, leading the music ministry feels like trying to praise the Lord  while wading through a river of tar. But on those days when you raise your voices—when you join us—you lift us up. You minister to us.

We don’t do this, week after week, because we’re looking for compliments and glory. This ain’t a concert. We do it because this is how we serve the Body of Christ. That’s not to say that ego and personal preference don’t plague us—because they do. We struggle against the inner divo/diva all the time.

But not when you sing. When you sing, when we hear your voices alongside ours, we worship together. When you sing, we know, deep in the heart of our being, that we are exactly where we are supposed to be.

So come on. Open your mouths, belt out the words of faith. Drown us out. Let’s do this thing together.