jayber crow

It's been a long time since I wept at the end of a book, but today I did.

Read "Jayber Crow" by Wendell Berry.

not a joke I'd recommend making...

... next time you're doing a concert "for small and tall" at a community pancakes-and-sausage breakfast... and you see a family with a little girl holding tightly to a cute little stuffed pig... and you say:

"Wow, great idea - you brought your own sausage!"

Oops.

restless blessings

I have felt enormously blessed lately as I continue to be invited into the lives of different communities - churches, schools, various circles of friends and colleagues and co-conspirators - in the living out of this musical vocation. While some aspects of this feel like they're becoming more "routine" (in the sense that I'm more used to it now), it continues to feel anything but "routine" (in the sense of bland or boring or predictable). I continue to have to "give my head a shake" so often that my head-shaker gets sore...

I am also grateful for the income that has been coming in... from performances, CD sales, a bit of publishing from my songs, households and congregations becoming "members" of SmallTall Music and supporting this ministry that way (including a couple of souls that have expressed, and acted on, a desire to support this ministry with considerably more than their current "membership fees").

And yet it's ironic that, as these things continue to happen (and, with tax time here, as I actually look at the numbers and wonder again about the financial viability of it all), I find more and more of my time and energy taken up with administrative tasks, and have had (or, more accurately, have managed to take) less and less time for the actual creative work of WRITING SONGS.

There is a kind of restlessness that I'm having trouble naming or describing... a kind of scattered taking-care-of-a-gazillion-details-but-no-sustained-concentration-for-anything mode that has been going on for too long...

And then the other day I was brought up short by a friend's request. Pieter asked me to be the "speaker" at his ordination service.

Wow.

Somehow this has impacted me more than I know how to express. I cycle between feeling flabbergasted, elated, terrified, and deeply honoured. And as I prepare, and contemplate Pieter's ministry, I wish I could say it's giving me new perspective on my own. It's not as definite as that yet. Right now it's more like a wake-up call.

swamped

Swamped in a sea of songbook stuff, it seems. Hoping to get it all together and to the printers by Monday.

It's a good thing that the "thoughtful reflections on songwriting and faith" department is being so well-taken-care-of by Jonathan.