Joining the choir

I’ve joined a Christmas choir! With 80 other people! It’s uplifting for the soul and challenging for the mind. I have to learn 18 new songs with lots of difficult things like syncopation, dotted eighth rests, and unresolved chords.  I have to start learning how to read music again. It’s been a while, and the director is very animated and very exacting. “YOU CAN’T LEARN THIS STUFF JUST BY COMING TO PRACTICE!!! He says, “YOU HAVE TO PRACTICE AT HOME!!!!! YOU HAVE HOMEWORK!!!!!” he says. “OK, I GET IT,” I don’t say.

But I’m glad to be in a classroom of sorts, and I don’t really care which side of it I am on, the learning side or the teaching side; I enjoy them both about the same. The challenge is invigorating. Of course, I realize that learning goes on in all kinds of places, like border-crossing lines, for example, where I learned last night that airport immigration officials are different from border-crossing guards. The border-crossing guard looked at the electronic note tacked onto his computer by the shaking-head immigration guard I met in Toronto last week. “So when did you last cross the border?” He asked, just testing us. It was late and we couldn’t remember, because we thought he meant crossing the border by land. “We can’t remember,” we said. Pretty bad since it was just last week. “Have you gotten that residence card?” He asks? “Uhhhhh,” we answer. “Working on it, right?” he fills in for us.” “I suppose so,” we answer. Lamest answer since the last one. But the guard had already passed us back our lame documents and waved us on. No shaking of heads or ridiculing of 25 year old documents. Welcome to Canada.

Or you can learn in chemo lounges where I was today. The lady registering with the receptionist in front of me had had it. She told us all that she had terminal cancer and that today she would be told how long she had to live, and that it was……#***$@@#$......to be spending these moments of her life waiting in line. She was sick, and at the reception desk she put her head down as she waited for her wrist band and paperwork. We all got a taste of what anger and frustration and weariness can do to you when you’ve had enough and you’re expected to put out still more. In the chemo chair, with that IV fluid going into your arm straight out of the freezer where they’ve stored it so that no matter how warm you are when you sit down, you are shivering in a few minutes, and your arm is cold even after it’s been warmed up in a blanket before you got started, you look around. Next to me, a daughter waited beside her father in a tight black dress and high heels. Going to work was my guess. Her sister spelled her after a while so she could leave. “Wish I had my kids that close,” I said. I relearn every day how much I miss them.

Yesterday I had been in Pennsylvania overnight to see Phil and Eunice and Ian (our teammates) and Hampton and Ginny (former teammates; long story). We were by a lake in the Pocono mountains, where the quilted fall colors fed you like dessert. The conversation was as rich and varied as the leaves. One of the topics was this: You know that when you come to God, you don’t really have any clear idea of how much he’s forgiven you. He’s forgiven everything, even what you haven’t confessed, because you never know how much you’ve actually done to hurt people. We’re clueless, really, about how much sin we carry and how much he’s lifted from us without our knowing. And part of heaven’s wonder will be the growing awareness of how much He’s done. Of how forgiving He really is. Of how wide His love is. It will be a growing repentance, but without the shame or the guilt. It will be wonder. Wow. What He’s done! And I think it will be like learning. Like the pleasurable hard work of learning a complex and beautiful song. Together. As a choir. With an exacting and animated and utterly loving director. An eternal song of praise ever growing because we’re always learning how much he has done, and is doing, and will do. Forever. That’s the classroom I look forward to. Don’t you?