Singular Scene

So Singular in Each Particular

From Room to Room

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The whole business of quietly withdrawing from one congregation in favour of attending another is an introspective one.  To do such a thing invites speculation about why one might make such a choice, invites gossip and judgment as someone who (for all intents and purposes) has got lost along the way, so it’s impolitic for one’s own mental health to make a big deal about it.

Which isn’t to say it’s no big deal.

The last time I blogged about it I hadn’t actually made any kind of commitment to doing such a thing, I was a dual citizen of two churches.  In many ways I still am, I worship with one congregation on weekends but the majority of my close friendships are still back at the ‘mother ship’ and I’m still up there teaching and contributing.  So for many people who weren’t accustomed to seeing me on weekends anyway things may not have changed.

In the grand scheme of the situation the choice to make that leap came after one particularly astute (prophetic actually) friend asked me this question… in fact she phrased it as follows.

“Dee, all I can hear God asking you is, What do YOU want??”

It took me 4 days to come up with an answer… I mean, if in fact you believe God is asking you a question like this you take time to answer… what do I want?? Money? Fame? A Relationship??  While I was mulling the question over prayerfully I finally concluded the following and while I’m sure God could have been asking the question in any of the other contexts this was the answer I absolutely couldn’t get away from in the end.

What I want is this… to love going to church on a Sunday. 

The truth was I hadn’t done so for a very long time.

With that answer in mind it was really easy to make the choice to commit to my new faith community and having done so I’m really thrilled to be part of a church family for whom the people are more important than the community itself, for whom God is more important than anything and whose relationship with God is real, earthy, intellectual as WELL as spiritual.  It’s a place whose people are accepting, real, and who are in the best possible sense a body of Christ.  (Which before you leap to any kind of conclusion isn’t to say that the opposite is true of the former.)

I have no wish to speak ill of one place or the other, I have no wish to look back in anger or sadness, or to have expectations on this new place to be anything other than a collection of people doing their best to follow God and make an impact in the world around them…  God is bigger than both, both have their good and bad points, we’re human after all,  and all IN all I’m a small part of a very big picture.

And in the grand scheme of things, was it church that changed?

No. Not at all. 

It was me.

To be continued

Been Waiting a Long Time for This.

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This arrived in the post today.
You may think that it’s not much to look at, but if you’re a singer/muso and GarageBand owner this thing’s a beauty. You plug it into the Mac and hook up your keyboard and mic to it and ‘Bingo!’ you can call yourself a recording artist. And if you’re a geek; it’s another gadget… and you can’t be unhappy with any product if it has cables and sockets.
I bought this baby on ebay.
In December.
It FINALLY arrived today… I won’t bore you with the tedium of the details, but let’s say someone at the USPS couldn’t tell his Argentina from his Australia causing me to say to the vendor, “they begin and end with the same letters but there’s a world of difference in between”. I was less than pleased, as you can imagine…
However, the bigger part of the story is actually not the eventual arrival of this unit; instead it is the purpose for which it was purchased.
You see, I’m singing again.
I’ve done a little, you may have heard it at Christmas time, but I’ve never really talked about why it’s been so long since I did the one thing that actually brought me to Australia.
Simply put, someone who had an inordinate amount of influence in my life asked me to stop.
It wasn’t because I wasn’t good at it, it was because my singing got in the way of his purposes, the purposes that were all about him achieving his ends and not wanting me to have anything in my world that got in the way of that, anything that got in the way of me being completely available, or me having any confidence that I was anything without him. (It makes me sick even to write that down, 4 years later).
Initially he said it would only be for a few months, but when I asked him, at the end of that time, when I could get back behind the mic he simply said that he felt “like God really still didn’t have his hands on me” as if using the gift God gave would be contrary to doing ‘the Lord’s work’!
I know, you’re probably reading that and thinking, “this is precisely the reason why God fucks so many people up” and you may also be wondering why I still even go to church. The truth of it is, when I finally got out from under his influence I determined that I wasn’t ever going to let a man get in the way of me and my relationship with God. For better or worse God is bigger than the shit that goes on in church, none of the petty (or the monumental) stuff changes Him.
Anyway, I stopped singing in 2003 and except for a couple of terms singing with Jonah in 05 I haven’t taken it seriously again until now.
Now I’m singing in a choir of my own making. Mine. I’m working on it with one of my very best good friends and on Monday we had our first rehearsal. There were 6 of us there, the foundation members of our community choir.
Even if I say so myself, we sounded awesome.
The Tascam was bought so that we can record parts for rehearsal tracks and to record rehearsals.
The 2nd part of my reason for starting up this choir is that I’m not the only person who lost their place to sing and I wanted to give it back to them too.
I don’t think any circumstance is ever wasted. It all works out for good somewhere along the line, and you know,
…I think all good things come to those who wait.