Jubal’s Jottings

So, here I am in the middle of this monstrous creative music project…taking most of a year to write, arrange, orchestrate, rewrite, get help with charts, find an orchestrator, consult with people in several other countries, studios here and there, working with other musicians, professional and amateur…

Yet, in the past 2 weeks I have found the sounds of 3 grandchildren to be ultra-profound. A 9-month old granddaughter…shapes her mouth into a perfect “ooo” form, leans forward, and utters soft, innocent cooing sounds…a 2 year-old grandson who jumps up and down with a big smile, banging 2 empty plastic bottles together while I make up some song never to be remembered (and when the song is over, he actually wants more!!!)…a 2-week old granddaughter who cries loudly, even when I try to make up a soft, soothing lullaby. What creation of mine could possibly compare to the music of another generation being sounded?

Jubal, you should have been there…humbling in the best sense of the term.

So, back to Africa I went…again. This is now the 3rd trip in the past 7 months, with 2 left to go! This trip was the expected set of very helpful and important meetings with some really nice people…people of all kinds! The centerpiece of the trip was 5 days in a studio in a small town outside of Cape Town…recording African percussion, high school aged singer, children singers, and adult men singers. It was a real parade…with other things in between as well. There is nothing quite like having real people do real music. It wasn’t all that polished and professional, but very real and wonderful. I wondered many times…”How did I get here…doing this?” My mother certainly never would have imagined that her bribery to get me to practice the piano would lead to places like that! (By the way, she should have bribed me more than she did!) Anyway, the project I’m working on is certainly a once-in-a-lifetime deal. Even with technical difficulties and the like, it is a real rush to be involved in this project. If you’re interested in the conference, the website again is: www.lausanne.org.  Check it out, and pray that I can actually get it done! It’s going to be a long summer of writing…lots of isolation!

Jubal, we were playing percussion on clay pots and all kinds of things that YOU probably never even thought about!

If you’re a sports fan at all, you will have noticed that this past week John Wooden passed away. What may not be so readily apparently is any relationship between John Wooden and worship leadership. I saw many correlations! In fact, this was the last week of class for the quarter and I took copies of the diagram of Wooden’s Pyramid of Success…and some of Wooden’s many famous, insightful quotes, to class for discussion. The Pyramid of Success is a set of philsophies that Wooden taught and embedded in his UCLA basketball teams, but also had great application for success in business and other areas of life. As I read once again the words on Wooden’s building blocks of success, I was amazed at how many of them paralleled principles we have talked about in class as we worked our way through Oswald Sanders’ book, Spiritual Leadership. Things like integrity, character…and others. In a future blog I’ll make more specific references to Wooden’s quotes and principles that I think could be used for worship leadership success as well.

Jubal, you should have seen John Wooden’s basketball teams play. They were really good!