Let Her Sing.

I have a guitar. I play it sporadically. I love to sing. I do that often.

I sing in public. I sing in quiet. I sing in the shower. I sing at my desk. I sing in the bathroom.

I won't hide it--it is not that I don't even care, it is that I do not even know how to care.

So, I sing. 

Enter: A Very Sad/Comical Anecdote from My Life (the wannabe singer)

For 5 summers of my life I worked out a summer camp. I loved it. Everything about it. About camp. About kids. About the activities. But mostly what camp was.

My last 2 summers I served on the leadership staff where I was able to oversee and run all of the night events for the junior high and high school kids. If you are a first-time reader of my blogging endeavors, to fill you in, this camp is a Christian summer camp. Each night we had something that was called "Lodge." It was where we would do fun, interactive skits and games and then lead into a discussion about Jesus and life application and we would finish it up with some worship music. The same person would normally lead worship every week. Well, on a particular week, the guy who normally sang was gone on a week vacation. I was asked if I could lead worship about 30 minutes before. (They knew I had a past history of leading worship...but it had been about 4 years and I had played and sang in a group, very different than being alone).

Enter: Sweaty palms, dry mouth and anxiety. My answer: "Sure, why not?"

"Sure. Why not?" Put me up in front of a crowd and tell me to be ridiculous. Done. Tell me to act stupid. Done. Tell me to dance around. Done. Tell me to stand alone and sing: give me some time. Please?

So, I googled two songs and the chords and had to print them off. There was no way I would remember that quickly. I am not a natural talent. (There was a period of time when I would pray and ask the Lord to bless me with the voice like that of Alicia Keys when I woke up in the morning. But there are some things that are just not meant to be. But that does not mean I can't enjoy Garage Band and pretend I have my own recording studio. I know, I'm almost 25 and clearly in a good place in my life.) "I believe the word we looking for here is...anyway..."

To understand what happens next, I want to invite you into the room. Come right in. Enter into the room full of 100 or so high school kids. All are sitting on the cold hard cement and staring up at you. The lights go dim. The PowerPoint goes up with the words to the song that if you're leading...you should have memorized. That is my cue to begin. First song, entitled, "Our God is Greater," begins to a little bit of a rocky start. I feel my heart begin to pound. My voice begins to forget how to produce sounds. The cheat sheet falls off the stool, I try to keep going. (At this point I am praying that I would and could go Alex Mac style and disappear and slip away as goo). Second song, I am now just praying for divine intervention. Truly. The back of my neck is sweating and my heart is anxious. My co-worker/leadership counterpart begins to run up from the back of the room. I being to think in my head, "Yes, Max is going to help me. He is a great singer. He is going to take the mic from me and make this all better." What really happens: he plugs the amp in the guitar that I forgot to plug in at the very beginning. This only makes the sound louder. And worse. I skipped over most of the song and my voice cracked and was described by one of my co-workers as "a young 12 year old boy going through puberty."After what seemed like the longest 7 minutes of humiliation in my life, I took off my guitar, handed it off to someone else and asked her to play for the next group of kids. How I managed to ask her to do this without breaking into tears, I am not so sure. Since I could not get in my car and drive west bound on 20 all the way home, I fled to my cabin. Yes, I live in a cabin for a sweet little period of my life.

At the age of 23, I curled into a ball and wept like a baby in my bunk bed. (Clearly I have let all walls down at this point to be vulnerable enough to confess to all that this really happened). After the 2 other girls on leadership made me unlock the door and let them in, I still cried like a 4 year old who lost her toy and said I would never show my face in public. I was mortified. To both of those girls, Kelsey and Dana, I still say: bless your hearts for comforting me in that moment and somehow being able to handle my melodramatic breakdown. They got me out of my bed (after quite some time of self-pity), made me laugh about it and told me to grow up, that life would go on and to get up.

I tell this story for 2 reasons: #1. To remind you that at any moment, at any age---you will feel like an idiot at some point. We all need to be humbled. #2: This is the other reason: In the middle of all my squeaky pre-teen singing, I look up to see one, small junior high girl amidst all of the chuckling high-schoolers with her eyes closed and her hand lifted to the sky as she softly sang and praised God.

I am not saying that to truly worship you need to close your eyes and lift your hands up. But it is about the heart behind it. And from knowing what her counselors had told me about her, that girl loved the Lord and was singing out to him. Regardless of how I felt in that moment, my heart goes out to that girl. The one who sang beyond what she heard. The one who did not care if the slides were off. The one who did not notice that the girl up in front could not sing. It did not matter to her. She knew that her God is bigger.

Every time I hear that first song that I sang that night, I smile and am reminded of that moment. That awful moment that I thought was horrible and now count it is a sweet memory. And a blessing. It's funny how things change.

So here is what I say to that girl: Sing your heart out.


-S