The Christmas season is filled with many things from food, to gifts, to music, and it is music that had me wondering the other day.
Driving recently I was flashing back over the years of driving with students to various service projects, field trips and work experience businesses. It seemed that every memory, of every student I ever drove in my vehicle was accompanied by music … and singing.
To relieve the concern that those of you who have been reading faithfully for awhile now of the concern you must be feeling, I will assure you that I do not do the singing! I would fear that, in singing with my students, I might get sued for damaging the eardrums of those innocent and unassuming teens. After all, my voice is a choir voice … a really, really, really big choir, voice … if you know what I mean 😉 … but, I digress …
So, as I was flashing back, I heard the voices of my students over the years.
I heard the boy with Downs Syndrome who sang silly preschool songs with my son.
I heard the adolescent girls singing along with the group Starfield.
I heard the most beautiful rendition of “Holy God”, that the songwriter could not outdo.
I heard the adoring singing of a teen boy singing “Beautiful One” … not to God, but to another Educational Assistant in whom he saw the love of the God who the song was written about.
I heard the teenage boy who normally preferred choral music to the Taio Cruz “Dynamite” song he asked to play and sing to while driving to work each day.
I heard the teenage boy who preferred his ‘bad boy’ rep. but who always turned the volume up and sang along to Chris Tomlin’s “How Great is our God.”
And this week it was Justin Bieber’s “The Christmas Song.”
What a joy to hear their voices, comfortable to share them with me, as I listened with solemn stillness, appreciating the fact that my vehicle often became a place of unhindered holy ground. Through all of these songs, from such a variety of students, I have heard their voices, but also their souls shouting out through their singing.
It got me to thinking, to wondering about the music of Christmas. So much of the music of Christmas is a call for us to listen, beckoning, to join in …
“Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”
“Angels we have Heard on High”
“Do you Hear what I Hear?”
“Oh Come Let Us Adore Him”
and, maybe best of all,
“… and all the world send back the song which now the angels sing …”
itsawonderfilledlife 