Youth Music Mission 2022: Nashville, St. Louis, Memphis. First post.

Salutations!

Welcome to the official blog of the 2022 Youth Music Mission. Tomorrow morning, 34 singers and 9 adults will board a bus and head north.

It's been a few years since I've done one of these trips. My final tour at my last church was cancelled because of the pandemic, and last year we were unable to travel...again because of the pandemic. I'm going to try, as much as I can, to avoid talking about the pandemic in the blog. By now everyone knows how pervasively and profoundly it has impacted...everything. But I do want to take a moment to acknowledge that the pandemic isn't over. In 20 years or so of doing these trips, I've never been more stressed or nervous than I am right now, the night before we leave on the 2022 trip (and that includes the time I called a venue to tell them we were 15 minutes out, and the person on the other end of the phone said she thought it was the next week...and she wasn't just trying to be funny).

I'll also say that the pandemic has created a few interesting opportunities I'll share with you along the way. Specifically, there will be a couple of chances for you to see us sing live!

Rest assured we are taking every precaution we can, both for our own safety and for that of our audiences. That started with 43 of these:

Every participant tested tonight and sent me their result. Thankfully all tested negative, and we are ready to go! I'd say this is a positive first step, but that would be confusing. And it wouldn't even be funny. So I'll go back and delete that before I hit "publish."

Tomorrow morning we'll be meeting at the church around 10am (an hour and a half later than originally planned, but I'll tell you about that tomorrow!). A little rehearsal, some orientation, packing the bus, and we'll be on our way to our first concert, which will be in Chattanooga.

We carry programs with us to hand out to the audiences. It has our concert order, our singers and chaperones, and a little blurb about our concert and about our mission. I'm going to put that below so you can get an idea of what we are hoping to accomplish with our music.

I'm excited to be back at this. The music, the sharing, the fellowship, all of it. Just...if you get a chance, say a little prayer I haven't forgotten how to do it.

Oh. One more thing. If you see something in this post or any other post that makes you think or inspires you...or if you'd like to offer some encouragement to our singers and chaperones, feel free to drop that in the comments below or on FB!

Until next time,

John

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God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. 

~1 John 4:16b-21

I can’t always predict what (or who) I will hate, but I know it when I feel it. The feelings well up from inside. Frustration. Anger. To be clear, sometimes I experience frustration and anger without hate. But I never experience hate without frustration and anger. Hate is somehow more than mere frustration. So what is the difference? Where does hate come from? It isn’t an easy question, but it is an important question.

Some people would say the opposite of love is hate. It certainly feels that way. The emotions of love seem antithetical to those of hate. But to me hate feels less like a cause and more like a symptom—like the true opposite of love lies somehow even deeper in our souls than hate. Fear feels to me like the seed that, fed and watered by anger, blossoms into hate.

The great theologian Yoda once said, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” There’s real wisdom in that. It implies that hate is predicated on fear. That feels true to me: so often the things we hate the most are the very same things we fear the most. Part of the human condition is hatred of the unknown, which likely springs from fear of the unknown. Of course we fear more than the unknown. We fear loss: loss of place or power or relevance. We fear gremlins of the past: would haves and could haves that obscure a hopeful future where we have learned the lessons the past has to teach. We fear judgment of God, maybe, or even worse, the judgment of others on our lives hastily lived.

We fear each other. Because we don’t know each other. We are divided by race and age and gender and… But what if we weren’t divided by those things at all. Or rather, what if we aren’t divided by those things? What if the things that divide us are just projections of our fear? Fear that there isn’t enough to go around. Fear that we will be left out or left behind.

In the book of Revelation, John explains that in the new Jerusalem, darkness and the sea, both of which represent the unknown, will be no more. There will be nothing to fear, and without fear we will find peace. Not just peace. We will find love. And where we find love we will find God, because God is love. Living in love frees us to move beyond the bounds of fear. It allows us to shine our light confidently into the world, trusting that good things lie ahead of us...and that bad things or even the worst things yet to come are not the last things.

All of which brings us to you, our brothers and sisters, hoping our songs bring you joy and peace, and of course love.