Thursday, October 28, 2010

What Am I Doing Here?

One day, when I was in a pensive mood, I began to ponder the question "why am I here in this place at this time".
The question had been asked a few times in earlier years but with few or no answers. Now, on this day, I had the time and desire to figure out an answer that I could live with. And so I began with looking around in my belief system if the answer could be found there, in what I call the dim recesses of my brain.
Thus it appeared to me that the answer to the question could be found in the type of work I was engaged in before retirement, and that work was centered on music. Now you may think I am leading in to a killing tirade against present day pop and rock music but, surprise, surprise, I am not going that route.
My involvement with music (after getting a degree) was with choral music in a definitely old timey conservative setting. That period ended after twelve years when I changed to a church whose pastor told me one afternoon we needed to have a mini staff meeting and met me in a restaurant where he promptly ordered a beer. After all those years in a church where alcohol was worse than sin, here my pastor and I sit, talking church business, while enjoying a nice beverage in moderation, meaning one glass each.
There came a 27 year stint at the local College as head of the music department and now I am retired and liking it, and thinking the question of why am I here needs an answer.
I think I have found an answer. Working in churches was sharing the world of Christian choral music with the same congregation year after year, suddenly I found myself in the world of ALL music, sharing my enthusiasm for good music with groups of students who were no longer static but changed three times a year, two semesters and one summer session. This college is a state institution so I could not major on Christian principles and dogmas but much music had been composed by writers who were known for their Christian beliefs like Johann Sebastian Bach which showed in their works.
So I think the answer to why am I here comes because of my personal and church backgrounds that gave me a total overview of the great, wonderful world of music that over the span of 27 years was shared with some 27,000 students, a total number that makes me feel humbled because it shows the number of people I exposed to what my God in Christ wanted me to tell them.

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