MTC Week #86 - Of Least and Most

Hills.

Back in my cross-country days, our coach would supplement our regular training (running on relatively flat ground) with "hill training", which, just as its name describes, involves running up hills. You can imagine this was not a lot of fun. In fact, I don't remember anyone begging the coach that we could do more of such training. It was hard! And not only that, for us new to the sport, we failed to grasp the reasoning behind doing it since most of the courses we'd be racing on would be fairly flat. In the end, we had to simply have faith that the coach knew what he was doing. We had to trust that the upward climbing would pay off.

Thursday night we rehearsed a particular piece which looked deceptively easy. We quickly came to learn, though, that it was not--on multiple levels. It was a slow piece. It didn't move much. It was prone to intonation (pitch) problems. It required us to really think before singing any of the notes. I can't speak for the whole choir, only for myself and some around me, but we really didn't love the piece and didn't like how much it was extracting from us! It was very much like climbing a hill.

Felix Mendelssohn -  Composer of one of the songs
we sang today "O Thou the True and Only Light"

At one point, Bro. Wilberg (amidst some loving frustration) told us that he knew it was a hard piece. "But it's a beautiful piece, and we're going to do it," he said. That caused me to reflect. Our wise and talented director was finding beauty in something I was not. Furthermore, he wanted us to do this piece not only because it was beautiful, but also (making an assumption here) because he knew we'd be a better choir by rehearsing it, working at it, and perfecting it. He knew it would pay off--not just for today when we performed it, but when we applied what we learned to rehearsing other songs in the future.

It was then I decided to not let the hill get the best of me. I tried looking for the beauty and began noticing how pretty the orchestration was and how great the lyrics were. In fact, the lyrics spoke of God having mercy on those who had lost their way and about Him working to get them back--certainly a theme we can all relate to in one degree or another.

While the piece will probably not rank anywhere near the top of my favorites, I'm glad for the lessons I learned: trust in your leaders; if something is hard, do it anyway because it will pay off; look for the good in everything; and know that something you may like the least, may, just possibly, turn out to benefit you the most in the long run.

Until next time, God be with you.