God's Faithfulness - Part 1

11 years ago, I told the principal of the high school where I worked that I would not be returning the following year. It was both hard and not hard. For me, it was a no brainer that when I had children I would be the caretaker. It's not something that I spent time trying to figure out. I knew that is how I wanted it to be. So, in that way, it wasn't hard. The way it was hard is that I loved my job. I was the choral director for an Arts Magnet High School. I worked with some pretty amazing students and it was such an honor and privilege to work with those students! Most days my office was full of students eating their lunch with me and talking about important issues in life. I developed relationships with the students that caused them to want to speak to me freely about hard things that they were going through. 

We also made some pretty great music! I had 5 choirs. Die Meistersingers was the advanced Chamber choir that was mainly an acapella group, Jazz Company - all jazz music, Select Women's Ensemble, Treble Chorus, and Men's Chorus. We did about 4 major concerts each year as well as the extra performances that we did throughout the community all through the year, and in the Spring a Musical on top of everything else that I had to do! It required about 50-60 hours per week. Not too hard to complete a work week like that when you don't have little ones at home.

I wrestled a little bit with the amount of time and money that I spent to train to do the type of work that I was doing - and how when I stopped working to stay at home with my child - would I have just wasted all of that time and money spent? I knew the answer to that was "No!", but I had to talk myself into it a little bit! 

Not only did I say goodbye to my job of spending 6 hours a day behind a piano training young voices, I also said goodbye to singing in worship at church.

I tried to keep that up for a little while, but it became complicated after a while, since at the time my husband was the pastor of the church. We had decided that we always wanted our little ones to be in worship with us - we prayed about it and felt as though God was leading us in this somewhat difficult direction. In order to follow my husband's lead on this (and my own heart as well), there were sacrifices that needed to be made. For me, it was not being as involved in the music at church. 

I have never spent a single second regretting the decisions that we made as our new baby joined our family and as 3 more joined our family throughout the years. While keeping the children with us in worship has been challenging and exhausting at times, I've also seen the fruit that it has produced that spills out over so many areas of our lives. 

When I traveled to Nashville, TN a little over a year ago. I was able to go to a concert that was being presented by a former choral conductor of mine from college with many performers that I knew from my college days. Because my children were acquainted with sitting quietly and especially having the trained self control to do so, I was able to go to this concert with my 4 children(ages 2-9) and sit through a very long performance of Handel's Messiah. It was a total blessing to me that I could sit through this wonderful performance, but how much more it was a blessing that I could do it with my 4 children! 

So, saying goodbye to my well-loved job and even singing or playing the piano at church was both hard and not hard. 

However, in the past year to year and a half there has been a stirring in me. I really missed singing. I have spent the last almost 11 years singing to my sweet children, but I was longing for a little bit more than that.

Thankfully, I never even had to tell my husband. He already knew. In fact, he's the one that brought up the fact that he thought it was time for me to start singing again! All of our children had gotten to the point where it only required one of us to be sitting with them. So after we went through the new membership process at our new church I plugged in with the worship team. I'm so thankful to be singing again!

And if that wasn't enough...