One Year Ago

September 5, 2008

Our Sound Foundation "team" with whom we did everything.

We’ve all been there: you wake up one morning, go about your routine, and are in the middle of brushing your teeth when the thought jumps out like a mischievous brother from behind a door. “What was I doing a year ago today?” Your mind rewinds past a Christmas, a birthday, a year of growth, and a lot of maturing and then pauses on a memory that occurred exactly 365 days ago. That’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow. No, I won’t be looking back to a world event or an amazing discovery. I’ll be reminiscing instead about my last day at Sound Foundations—a music course—in Indianapolis, Indiana. For three weeks that stretched like an eternity for a girl who was away from her much-loved family but that moved much too quickly for a girl who was making lifelong friends, Mikaela and I were with 57 other homeschooled, Christian young people learning how best to glorify God with our music.

I got to experience conducting an orchestra!

We crammed for theory tests on harmonic analysis, watched and listened to an elderly man sing the Psalms with his beautiful white-haired wife, and arranged a hymn for our orchestra. We even survived piano master classes with a Russian pianist with plenty of skill but just no tact!

Mikaela's looking quite proficient!

We had fun, too—like when the elevator door slowly opened to reveal a huge overstuffed armchair elegantly placed in the center of the small space. And speaking of elevators, the button to the boy’s floor didn’t always work so swell—but they discovered a way to help it along: you had to stand on one foot with your tongue hanging out and sing the Hallelujah Chorus. Right! We got amazing packages from our family and friends back at home, and we were notified about them by a little piece of paper that proclaimed “O Happy Day! You have a package!” Whereupon we skedaddled to the office to pick it up, to the envy of the others! (-: We learned what it sounded like to sing “He Is King,” “As a Deer,” and “The Smile Song” all at the same time in different parts of the bus on the way to church: a fun sort of cacophony! We also realized what it is like to endure fourteen days without rain, and some of the girls even went out and had a water fight when a downpour finally came.

An object lesson from which we never quite recovered!

We could not have known it at the time, but that was the last Sound Foundations that would ever be held. Nevertheless, when the final note of our last choir song “Fairest Lord Jesus” died out at our concert, we all felt bewildered that it was over already, and the only thing we could do was look around at each other, hug, and say “good-bye” a million times over.

We made many friends!

From those three weeks I learned to worship God in a precious way I had never been able to do before; I grew by fellowshipping with girls who, amazingly, lived just as “counter-culturally” as myself; I learned how little sleep I could survive on; I learned and was inspired by the challenge learned that it is up to us to push forward a revival of God-honoring Christian music for the next generations.
In honor of my sentimentality, I am calling all Sound Foundations alumni (even if you went a different year!) to come out of the dark and comment! What have you done since Sound Foundations? What is your favorite memory? For the rest of you, what were you doing a year ago today?
As for me…Sound Foundations was a year ago, and when was the last time I actually took up the challenge, used what I learned, and stood for God-glorifying music? Um…oh yeah—yesterday.