Crossflame Choir 2010 Tour Day Two: Blackbirds

Today we spent the day at TPAC, the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, getting ready for and performing at the Grand Ole Opry Show, Sunday Morning Country (singin' for the Lord!- if your child comes back singing this, you'll know where it came from; Hannah's getting really good at it, as is Tad). We, amazingly, all got up for a super-awesome breakfast (they had grits! I love not leaving the south for tour!) and made our way onto the bus and over to the stage. On the way, we passed a car whose windows read "I'm going to see Taylor Swift!" And even though that wasn't the last time that name was mentioned today, it's the last time I'm going to say it. Oh. My. Lanta.

We shared a dressing room (the guys had one and the girls had another) with the members of the adult choir who was singing with the other performers, some of whom were tickled pink to see us in our bright green shirts. The last time we were here we had fluorescent orange shirts. I don't know which highlighter company we're trying to outdo, but at least we're recognizable. We sat in the audience and listened to many of the artists singing (see Amber-Drew's pictures for names and faces) and doing sound checks, which sounds lamer than it was. The artists ran through the songs and knew their stuff and the house band was pretty great (harmonica! Also, I've decided that Eli has to grow a mullet because the fiddle player in the house band had one), so we got a pre-concert for just us.

We ran out to lunch and came back sweating (ridiculous heat) and then it was time. We sat in the balcony for the first part of the show before intermission. Ron keeps on saying all this stuff about really carrying the message through your song, because anyone can be taught to sing pretty decently. What makes someone worth listening to is the way they tell the story and whether you can see God in it. I'll be the first to tell you that country music is not my scene, but I couldn't help being glued to the stage because there were stories to be told.

Intermission came and we headed down and spent a ton of time backstage. We lined up in our rows and proceeded to wait. And wait. And wait. The lady who played the banjo came over and talked to us and a couple people from the choir sat near us for a bit of it. Mostly, we were all trying to pump each other up and make each other smile and laugh so we could live up to the expectations. It was pretty much the best. We sang along to I Saw The Light while we were back there, and danced around, all the while trying to be quiet and holding in silent laughter. Then, with nervousness and without, we walked onto the stage and up on the risers (walk, turn, step up, close, step up, close, step up, close, turn). Apparently the joking and the preparation worked: we've heard all lot of good things from a lot of people about our performance. One of the chaperons was even complimented on our performance from a car window by people that had heard us and identified her (it's not hard) from our shirts. We stayed backstage after we performed much more relieved. All in all, not bad for the first performance of tour.

We came back and ate dinner and had a devotion. One the way back from dinner me and Hannah and Elizabeth passed a bunch of blackbirds getting their last meal of the day and it made me smile. God moments for the day from the group: We've heard from a group member that we're all bonding pretty well this trip, which is a wonderful blessing in itself. I had two-ish. One, when we were waiting to get our backstage passes (we're all VIPs- yup, we're that awesome) a group of people came through carrying things for the performance. We asked if they needed help and two of our group members helped them carry in crates of water. It doesn't sound like much, but it was great how trusting everyone was, our group members in offering help and them in accepting it. Also, waiting on our sound check, I overheard two of the sound guys talking about how great it was to work with this group of people- you get more pats on the back and more thank yous than you do working everywhere else. In a culture that increasingly views Christians negatively, it was wonderful to see something good happen between us all.

So, to sum up: We came, we saw, we sang. Third God-moment for me- so we kinda sucked it up on the sound check. We were just shaky on the words and when to come in and everything, so I was more than a bit worried when we walked back into the audience while the musicians stayed on stage. At Catie's behest, I got the group's attention and went over the words again. Catie said that we should sing it, which didn't seem like a bad idea to me. Amber-Drew gave us a starting pitch and I launched into what I was sure would be a failing endeavor. Then, somehow, everyone knew their words and sounded good. The tenors broke out some harmony and I heard an alto voice or two. It was wonderful, unplanned and beautiful. It was the choir I've been waiting to hear.

Like I said, country music isn't my scene- this post owes its name to the Beatles.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night,
Take these broken wings and learn to fly.
All your life,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

A Folk Tale

There once lived a beautiful Princess in a castle in the clouds, the daughter of the powerful Sky King and Queen. The Princess sat at her loom every day, weaving the cloth of the rainbows and gazing out her window to see the best places in the sky to place her beautiful cloth. It happened one day that she saw a Herdsman far below one day as she looked to cast out her cloth and immediately fell in love with him. She left her castle in the clouds with her work unfinished to meet the Herdsman.

The Sky Queen was very proud of her daughter's work, and very jealous of her daughter's time. When she found that her daughter had left the heavens for a man on earth, she called the Princess back up into the sky and locked her in the castle far away from the herdsman. But the Sky King took pity on the lovers and brought the Herdsman to his kingdom so the two could be nearer each other. To appease his wife and to keep his daughter weaving the rainbows, he placed a river between the Herdsman and the Princess so they may never truly be together. However, it is said that once in a year, blackbirds and magpies are allowed to fly up to the sky and make a bridge across the Milky Way to let the two lovers, called Vega and Altair by us, come across and meet each other. If there is a rainbow in the sky that day, the Princess has thrown her weaving away early, in a rush to meet her love before the sun sets and the bridge disappears.

The image below is a picture of the summer triangle take by the Hubble. The two bright stars on either side of the Milky Way are Vega, above it, and Altair, below it. Vega is in the constellation of Lyra the harp, for the more curious of you, and Altair in Aquilla the Eagle. The other star, the third brightest in the picture, looks like it's leading the Milky Way forward. It's Deneb, in the constellation of Cygnus, the only summer constellation besides Ursa Major and Ursa Minor I can point out with any reliability. If you look at the photo for a second, you'll see two stars above and below the Milky Way near Deneb, and three stars in an almost line pointing right. They're the arms of the Northern Cross, the rest of Cygnus the Swan.



There's a river between me and my Love. Maybe the world put it there, maybe I did, maybe it's been there and I keep on running back across it because life on the other side isn't as easy as I thought it would be. Somebody back in the day linked up a bunch of stars together in their mind and called it Cygnus. There's a black hole in that part of the sky- I've looked at its noise with a radio telescope. That black hole got the constellation stuck in my mind and I think it's wonderful how a week of research a summer ago and a Japanese and Chinese fable told to me a week ago serve to keep it always in my mind that there's a cross in the middle of the Milky Way, when I have such a tendency to forget that it's been in the river all along.

A Day in the Courts

Camp is like a clear night sky: I'm sure I could stand forever just drinking it in and it would never be enough.

Of course, I say that now when I'm not drained in a billion different ways after a month and a week of waking recalcitrant preteens and teenagers up at 8 and supervising their days until I fall down on my bed around 12:30 and hope that I didn't fall loud enough to wake the campers I sung to sleep two hours ago and who just fell asleep after wonderful conversations in the safe darkness of the cabins. At the same time, I don't think there's many places I'd rather be than Camp Joy. My mother got mad at me- she came into my room this morning and said, 'If you had cell phone service up there, I would have called you to make you come home. Did you come back just to go to camp?' And of course it's not true that I came back just for camp (though I would have) but it's not true that it was never on my mind as I tried planning to head back to Hickory this weekend. It was on my mind quite a bit actually.

I wish I had a thousand years to tell you about all my wonderful campers that I've had over the years. I wish I had an equal amount of time to tell you about the staff members, the group leaders and camp director and his wife and children. I wish I had the words to accurately describe the camp ground, but the remarkable thing is not the cabins or the Shepherd Shed or the pool or the meeting room, but it's the feeling you get there. That place, my friends, is holy ground and I hate it when I have to wear my shoes around the gravel roads.

I showed up yesterday in the middle of the staff meeting and was greeted by smiles and gasps and waves and immediately granted a seat on a couch. I made up beds in the cabins, played time-filling icebreakers, ate dinner (and did not have to eat sloppy joes against my will again!), played games out on the field (and watched the funniest human wheelbarrow ever, by the name of Kayla Bowles) and went to a glorious worship time. From the first quiet moments when everyone's waiting on their groups to arrive to the last chaotic seconds of the dismissal from Chapel, I felt like I was back where I belonged, like finally finding that perfect place on your bed before you start dreaming. I kept wanting to call for my cabin and I definitely kept answering camper's questions and calling them down like a group leader. Oh no. This post wasn't supposed to be a reminiscence about the wonderful afternoon I spent pretending to be who I used to be. This post is about Shakiera.

Shakiera, first night last year, first chapel session, broke down at Coach's testimony. I took her into the meeting room and prayed with her. 'And prayed with her.' How flat that sounds! Have you ever felt the Spirit move when someone prayed? Have you ever stood in a huddle, with a secret desire to leave the huddle because this is not 'how you pray', and felt like Amening with the rest of the group because there is a brother praying right beside you and you know, you know he is being heard? Have you ever just spoken straight up to your Heavenly Father, to your Lord who now sits at His right hand, and felt that that prayer changed the world because it was heard and it was acknowledged and it was answered, all in one outpouring of every bit of your broken and maimed and healed and redeemed and wonderfully whole soul? Because if you haven't had that, then yeah, to say that I prayed with Shakiera sounds flat.

Anyway, before that time and even some after, I thought that Shakiera was a loud-mouth, attention-seeking drama inducer. And she is. But goodness knows that child is so much more. In everything she did that week, all the hundreds of little things I can't remember, falling asleep when I showed them constellations on the field, screaming at bugs in the paddle boats, falling out of the paddle boats, comparing me to Anne Hathaway before the make-over in the Princess Diaries, everything, she showed me what kind of loud existence slept underneath my gentle sarcasm and I must have shown her something in return because she hugged me like she would never let me go when I left that day. Shakiera is one of the few people whose name I would yell across a parking lot and proceed to run to hug, which is what I did yesterday. After she jumped on me and hugged me and let me go, I told her I wasn't going to be a counselor this week- it would have been unfair to let her think otherwise for even a second- and she said, 'Why? Don't you know that you're my lifeline?'

Please tell me how that doesn't shine a light into your heart and make you see that what seemed like monsters in the dark are really too tiny to even been seen in the light. All the doubts I had, all the thousand reasons for running away, though one remains valid, all the fears that I had ruined a good thing forever, they were useless when it came to solid evidence for why I picked (I picked) the summer I picked this year. And I think in that second I would have called up to the planetarium and begged them to find someone else, anyone else to cover for me this week because I was needed elsewhere. But then, I have to remember that Shakiera is loud. The kid loves, when she loves, with everything she's got and she wears it like a thousand clanking bracelets or a gorgeous new dress. So I walk with her up to the cabin, sit near her at dinner, cheer for her on the field, make sure she has my address and phone number after chapel and receive two more superbly long hugs before I go. And going was right too, like moving your head one more time before closing your eyes here and opening them in that wonderful world of near near away.

So I stood on the concrete slab outside the meeting room on which I had dumped out flour for showing how craters were formed and vinegar and baking soda for making fun explosions the year before and I pointed out the few constellations I could remember, since most of my stargazing happens in the winter, to another one of the group leaders who wasn't a group leader, though he was preaching in chapel and playing piano and singing at worship the whole week and we talked and I kinda want to hold that in my heart as well, though I'm not sure that the weak part of my heart would stand up to that kind of test right now. I stared up at that sky because it had been a long time since I'd seen one so clear just like I had sung out songs in worship much too loud because it had been a long time since I'd been so near. You forget that God loves you, you know? Oh, I'm sure you always know that God loves you but you forget that He. Loves. You.

The same old question remains for me, though. Coach talked about meeting his wife (he proposed to her three days after meeting her by chance at a gas station and they've been married for nineteen years) and he said something about how God had had that planned all along. God set that out for him and when he found her, it was His way of reminding Coach that He loved him. It had always been there for him, he'd just been over somewhere else. Now, I don't know how much I believe that anymore, that there's a right place for us, that there's a somewhere we're meant to be and if we're not there, we're missing out because I'm a lot more inclined to believe that where we are is where we're meant to be. Right where you are is where you're supposed to be, otherwise, you'd be somewhere else. But I do know that God won't use you like He intended to unless you're willing to let Him and sometimes where you are changes how much you're willing. This fights in my brain and makes its way down to my heart because my heart has made it quite clear who it wants to be with and God has kept where I'm supposed to be out of this whole big mess that has been my thought process.

I apologize for leading you down the crazy road that is my cliche-ridden mind and once again, one day I'll stop with these sappy yet meaningful, if even just to me, posts. Then again, maybe then I'd be healed and how boring would that be? I leave you with the Beatles and some better lifewords.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night.
Take these broken wings and learn to fly.
All your life,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Arise from the dead and Christ will shine upon you. Ephesians 5:14

Arise, shine, for you light has come and the glory of the LORD rises on you. Isaiah 60:1

Arise, let us go hence. John 14:31



And the best thing is, my wings aren't broken anymore. I can fly (read live, really live) wherever I am.