While working at Camp Nejeda in New Jersey (the NJ camp for children with diabetes, for those who are unaware – another camp I spent time at when younger in addition to my first (and current) camp, Camp Seale Harris) my family and I lived in Bangor, Pennsylvania. One of the things that I loved about living where I did is that our church was only one block behind where our house was. So going there was really easy (and still relatively easy in bad weather or snow). That church is called Hopesprings Community of Faith (hopespringscommunity.org).
One of the things I ended up doing at Hopesprings was taking the audio file from the service each Sunday morning, editing it for any long periods of silence (as those listening wouldn’t have as much context as if they were there…and so they wouldn’t think something was wrong with their audio player), adding an intro and outro, and posting it on the church’s website as a podcast that could be downloaded.
Fast forward a few years to the present. While we have found a new church home in Alabama, I still do the podcast for Hopesprings courtesy of technology that we sometimes take for granted today. I’ve found myself trying to listen more and pay attention to everything I do – which includes listening to as much of the podcast as possible even though Hopesprings isn’t where I am right now. It would be too easy to just edit, add the intro and outro, and post without listening to more than 20 seconds of it…but I make myself listen.
The podcast featured in this post from Hopesprings was on the subject of the book of Psalms. The message this day was mainly through songs (very cool and appropriate). The pastor said something that explained a viewpoint on music that I had never been able to put into words.
“[Music] takes the content that we have all the time and puts intent to it.”
My wife, Sarah, and I have had the conversation before about each of our music choices. She enjoys listening to K-Pop (Korean) music where I don’t as much. I finally narrowed it down to a main reason – most of the music that I listen to falls into one of two categories: it either a) connects me to an emotion (such as movie soundtracks – they produce an image/action that binds with the careful emotion of the accompanying music that usually deeply affects me in some way) or b) I can pick out a harmony to the music (usually singing) almost instantaneously (I don’t enjoy singing solos as often because I’d much rather sing the harmony to a melody – I see myself as a complement to a voice instead of the voice that stands out by itself).
The emotion and harmony help define part of me – the empathetic and complentarian person who strives to help others while trying to understand what they feel, but doing so while in the background.
So…this message, while mostly music, was powerful to me. Listen to it below if you’d like.
Leave a Reply