Category: Music

Esperar

One of the advent hymns we don’t often sing is Toda la Tierra. It was originally a Catalonian text by a Spanish priest named Alberto Taulé, and translated into English (specifically for The United Methodist Hymnal) by Gertrude Suppe. Mrs. Suppe translated the opening line “Toda la tierra espera al Salvador” as “All earth is waiting to see the Promised One.” But in both Catalan and Spanish, “esperar” means more than “to wait.” It can also be “to wish,” “to expect,” and “to hope.”

In the Spanish translation of Psalm 33:20 (We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield) the modern NVI says “Esperamos confiados,” or “we wait/hope confidently,” and the traditional Reina Valera (in many ways the Spanish language equivalent of the King James) just says “Nuestra alma esperó,” or “our soul waited. It doesn’t need another word because hope is built in. Waiting isn’t always the easiest thing. But like many things in our faith, we do it because hope is built in.

T-Minus 3

It’s officially Monday, now, which means the day after tomorrow I’ll be on a plane.

I’m excited to go back to Ecuador, to see friends, to join ministries that I’m passionate about, to see what God has in store for me for an entire year and to begin to discover how He is going to use me. But most of the time it hasn’t really hit yet what a big deal it is. I just feel like I’m going to a familiar place for a short little while, and wondering why all these people keep hugging me and trying to cry.

One of the side effects of not doing lots of writing this summer has been a lack on information on my blog about the ministry that I’ll be doing. I think another may be that I haven’t fully processed it like I’m used to doing, so I’ll try to rectify that right now with a brief summary of what (I think) the next year has in store for me.

I will be headed back to work with Youth World, where I will be serving in a couple of ways that are right up my alley. I will be teaching music/guitar at at least two of Youth World’s partner ministry sites, Iglesia Carmen Bajo and Mision Emaus. I’ll also be doing some PR for Youth World, which will be in the form of writing for the organization’s web site (linked above) about the ongoing ministries at various partner sites.

When people talk about serving as a missionary, what comes to your mind? I have to say, until very recently, writing web pages and playing guitar would not have been my first answers. It’s fascinating to me that God uses my abilities for His work, no matter how strange a combination of skills I may seem to have, and how unimportant they seemed even to me before I thought about them in the context of ministry. But that’s the thing. Ministry is about people. It’s about relationships, and connecting people, and connecting with people, and God connecting with people.

Music is inherently social. I don’t believe I know anyone who builds, plays, and writes music for guitars. Maybe a couple people who do at least two of those things, but not everything that’s necessary for a beautiful piece of music to eventually get played for the first time. And I certainly can’t think of anyone who would bother to do any of those things if there wasn’t anyone else to enjoy it. I’ve found a love of playing for God, and I’ve even found (despite nerves and lack of talent) the joy of playing for other people in being part of worship. Something I picked up for my own enjoyment turns out something God uses for the benefit of other people, and a way for me to give back to him in a form that’s more personal to me than many others possible ways.

Writing is similar. We wouldn’t need the written word if we didn’t communicate with other people. And God has given me the opportunity to connect with people in some completely different places through things that I enjoy to begin with. How might He use the gifts He’s given you?

Yes, Honey, They're Brothers

Colin and I should be on HGTV.

Brothers can be completely different, get on each others’ nerves, and be super-competitive. All of that can describe Colin and me at some point past or present, if not in an ongoing sense. But brothers- in this case we– can totally be on the same wavelength sometimes.

Colin’s drums have been in the FROG1 for several weeks now, to give him more room to jam with his friends. With about half of my guitars and both of my amps up there for roughly the same reason- just to get them out of my room- and Daniel’s and Jacob’s guitars and guitar cases sometimes present, it’s been a pretty hazardous place to be lately.

So between a general desire to be able to safely navigate the FROG and complaints from everyone in the house, Colin started cleaning it up yesterday. This was also motivated by the addition of a powered mixer and two speakers.

For those of you not really into sound equipment, that’s basically a small, portable all-in-one PA system designed with microphones and instruments in mind, but with enough cables and adapters, you can hook anything into it: TV, Xbox, iPod, computer… you get the idea.

Without asking what the vision was or the plan of action for getting there, I joined in the cleaning. It was obvious to anyone that the room simply needed to be cleared out, rearranged, and organized if even a fraction of its contents were to remain and the room was to become easily traversed. But it was obvious to the Peck boys the potential this room now had to become what Kelli would call a “man cave.”

First order of business, pack up the instruments. Fortunately there was only one guitar present at the time that did not belong to me, so all the cases were handy. The air hockey table was pushed against the window and all guitars placed underneath. The Foosball table was pushed against the daybed by another wall and the chairs pushed up against that. Amazingly, this caused a sudden hole in the middle of the room from which to work against the remaining chaos.

While Colin set up his drums (and I think he finally has all his drums and cymbals set up together, which takes quite a bit of space) I began clearing off the computer desk, mom’s drafting table and the shelf behind the drums where the VCR2 was located. We finished at roughly the same time, with a net result of extended the open space and having two more surfaces to work from.

Before I knew it, Colin was pulling an old TV cabinet out of the closet. We have these two huge closets in the FROG where the roof slants down on either side of the dormer where the daybed is located. One is used to store camping and sewing equipment and the other is used to store Christmas decorations and old toys so that any of the above are accessible at shorter notice than they would be if they lived in the cubby3. The particular TV cabinet that Colin was pulling out is a pretty small, cheap, black shelving unit and formerly where the family TV downstairs lived. It is only a couple feet tall and the TV sat on top with the shelves underneath storing movies and Super NES accessories. When my parents replaced it with a nicer piece of furniture, I talked them into keeping it in case I ever finish college and leave and want it.

Colin got the powered mixer set up on top, with the Xbox 360 on top of that, and I set up the VCR and Gamecube underneath, running all the cables and putting four generations’ worth of video games into their respective cases as I went. Colin set up the speakers and with a couple of really useful adapters, I set up my laptop on the drafting table and connected it to the mixer, thus enabling me to stream music from my desktop in my room over the wireless network and play it through the newly-re-erected sound system.

With the furniture back in place, I thought we’d be finished. But Colin mentioned a general desire to have his computer up there for recording purposes. I figured we might as well get that done while we were on a roll, so with some quick thinking and some maternal advice, the drafting table was folded up and moved to the corner where the computer desk was. The computer desk was taken downstairs and placed in my van for transport to Albemarle Music (more on this below). The other closet, this time the one with the Christmas decorations- including tree- was accessed, cleared completely out, and a folding table removed from the very back, from behind about two dozen boxes and really heavy wooden shelving unit.

The folding table was erected, fitting perfectly against the wall between the end of the TV cabinet and the door, and about this time, Daniel showed up intending to pick up his laptop and leave, but staying to help move Colin’s (monster) desktop computer from his room to the FROG. This was quite an adventure because though Colin’s room and the FROG share a wall, you have to go from Colin’s through the upstairs hall, down the stairs, through the foyer, den, kitchen, and back hall, then up the other set of stairs to reach the FROG.

With the computer set up and the chairs replaced, we transported ourselves, the desk, and our moving and staging skills to Albemarle Music. We initially moved the couch in the office, then moved it back when we realized its new angle made the room feel much smaller. With the desk placed against the back wall, we moved the office computer off the counter and now have a much more professional-looking space and enough surface area for three people to eat lunch at once.

In summation, we’re awesome and so is the new man cave. Pictures are forthcoming, and if anyone wants an air hockey table, let me know.

 

1FROG is a real estate term in this region that’s become pretty ubiquitous in tidewater area vocabulary. It stands for Finished Room Over Garage and is what most of the rest of the country would refer to as a “Bonus Room.”
2Yes, believe it or not, we still have a VCR. It wasn’t that long ago that it got a lot of use for watching Disney movies with all my female friends- one in particular- and now mainly serves to extend the coaxial cable from the wall to the TV and as an extra set of RCA inputs for gaming systems.
3The cubby is an eccentricity of our house. Despite two attic access doors, one in the FROG and one in the upstairs hall, because of their precise locations the attic is still pretty inaccessible, and the cubby serves as our attic. It is basically a crawl-space-sized hall stretching from an access door at the top of the FROG stairs back over the rest of the house.

Radio, Wal-Mart, Censorship and other musings

Driving back to Sue’s from “Grandpa’s House” tonight I was marveling at the radio stations here in Atlanta. People my parents’ age complain that there is not a good Classic Rock station in Northeastern NC, and people my age complain that all they play on CHR is the same three songs until they are so overplayed we won’t listen to them again until they are Classic Rock.

What’s strange is that despite the huge amount of restaurants and traffic here and the presence of the world’s busiest airport, it took the multitude of good radio stations in the area for me to realize that I was not in what my uncle would refer to as “Mayberry.” What’s really amazing is that today, with an Internet connection and a Wal-Mart nearby, there’s just not that much difference between a big city and a small one.

And so we’ve reached Wal-Mart, and therefore Billy’s favorite: the rant.

The South Park re-run tonight happened to be the one skewering “Wall-Mart,” and did a pretty good job (as it tends to do, despite the way my mom and mothers in general tend to loathe it) of pointing out the downfalls of the world’s biggest corporation, employer and evil empire. We can discuss the cons of Big Box stores all night long, but they are easy enough to see and scarily hard enough to avert that I’ll avoid hypocrisy and carpal tunnel syndrome by skipping right to my point, demonstrated by my third hypothetical encounter of the night with Sam Walton’s corporate monster: this blog.

In case you’re Jerry too lazy to read it, the gist is that Wal-Mart won’t sell Green Day’s new album because the band refuses to release a censored version. I agree with the blogger that it obviously hasn’t been detrimental to Green Day’s sales (215,000 copies sold the first week). I also agree with Billie Joe Armstrong that a “young kid… making a record for the first time” should not be dictated to by Wal-Mart. And yet I strongly agree with Wal-Mart for sticking to their guns and upholding their long-standing policy of not selling uncensored music.

Again, I could write a diatribe here on the hypocrisy of Wal-Mart, which sells rifles, unrated movies with nudity and swearing, and sweatshop-produced clothing, but for some reason sees violence, swearing, and degrading ideas as inappropriate for the single, specific medium of audio recording. But again, not my point.

As a writer, a musician, and a (self-proclaimed) intelligent person (do I say “a” or “an” before a parenthetical phrase starting with a consonant but followed by the continuing sentence beginning with a vowel?) I disagree with censorship on principle. But as a Christian, an (I hope) moral person1, and a 99% reformed foul-mouth, I enjoy at least an attempt at censorship, however ineffectual (because bleeping out words so that you still hear something like mother****er2, 3 doesn’t really do anything to censor the idea).

I will stop here to somewhat expand on the idea of ineffectual censorship. There are two great Spanish-language radio stations here in Atlanta. Obviously, the censors aren’t as strict on them as they are in English (if there are any Spanish-language censors in this country). I heard a word tonight on one of those stations whose English equivalent would never make it onto the radio (at least I hope not, which is why my opinion slightly favors Wal-Mart on this particular topic).

The solution is for artists to just realize the power of words other than the four-letter ones. Upbeat, happy-sounding (realistic) Caedmon’s Call can be much more biting as a social commentary than any of the dirty-mouthed rockers in my collection. And I’d love to see a move towards cleaner music at the source. Because much as I don’t listen to the entire genre of rap because of the generally foul content, I go out of my way4 to make sure I have the original, uncensored recording of any music I do own, because that is how the artist intended it.

At least I’m consistently inconsistent.

1Went with “an” for that one. Hooray inconsistency!
2Insert Billy’s gasp here, at an almost-instance of Danny swearing on his blog.
3Better censor this guy!
4That task gets easier and easier for me every year as what I listen to is more and more “Jesus music” and less and less English.

Theology According to Regina Spektor

Lydia, I almost hope you aren’t reading my blog.

I put my iPod on shuffle this morning on the way to work. I have no idea why. I never do that unless I’m headed to the beach or farther. But nothing jumped out at me on the way back from COA and I lazily told the little device to pick music for me.

As I came down the last bit of US-17 before I turned down MacArthur and finally looped back around the other way on Ehringhaus to work, Regina Spektor came on. I’m not a huge Regina fan, and must admit that I once even turned down tickets to see her at the Norva (which is the place to see anyone). The only song I have of hers on my iPod is The Call, the song from the movie Prince Caspian, for which I had to buy the entire soundtrack on iTunes as the song isn’t available as a single.

As a musician, and as a (albeit terrible) songwriter, I don’t like telling people my interpretation of lyrics or even hearing (and potentially being influenced by) other people’s. I feel like part of the art form, and part of any art for that matter, is the interpretation by the individual exposed to the final product. I feel like the best artists of any kind are those who can both convey a specific message and yet leave it vague enough on the surface to be able to connect with and mean something to anyone who takes the time to appreciate and feel it.

So just know how much this struck me, both that I’m even writing this about a Regina Spektor song of all possibilities, and that I’m even writing it.

The lyrics, which probably can’t be legally reprinted here, can be found here (and this post will make a lot more sense if you either know or glance over them).

Driving along in Elizabeth City after being at COA and headed to Albemarle Music, two very different environments than, say, Quito, Ecuador, it was probably the “Just because eveything’s changing…” part that caught my attention. But upon further inspection, the entire thing can be applied to leaving Ecuador and coming here. Which I’m not going to do. I feel like I’ve done enough of that for a fortnight straight, and tend to sound a lot more negative than I intend when I do so.

Just the first part of the song (which is to some extent- musically- hard to listen to and yet lyrically brilliant in its simplicity) I relate it to faith. I’ve seen a lot of comments about the song on the internet, and depending on how literally it’s taken, some people insert what they think the “word” might be, with suggestions ranging from “love” to “Jesus.” And even though I point that whole paragraph (I think of it in written terms) to “faith” I wouldn’t insert it so directly. I think of my word as a perspective to go along with the lyrics, and each line as a step in a journey, and her “word” as one of those steps.

As an obvious, identifiable stage at a specific point in time, I would say (broadly, with no academic backing) all of our faiths began as an emotion. Be it guilt, joy, or wonder, at some point in your life you feel something that points you Heavenward, and should that be or grow to a hopeful sense of assurance, you began to think and know God on your own. The biggest leap here, at least for me, even more so than getting to the personal thought part, is that “word,” speaking Truth to others, and even more so the “battle cry” in strength and confidence.

Much like a lot of her other stuff, this song is way darker on deeper inspection. In a word of extremes and absolutes, forgiveness vs sin, faith vs doubts, the world vs the Church, the Trinity vs the Enemy, (and especially in such terms) it should be so much more evident how important it is to know who your fiends are as you head off to the war. (Has anybody actually noticed the pattern? If you’re really that coffee-deprived, I’m italicizing the lyrics).

The less and less vague you get, the less and less anything I write will mean personally to anyone who reads this. So we come again to my musician’s dilemma, and this is about where that side of me wins and I (as usual) let you connect the dots.

And I said I wouldn’t relate this to where I am and where I’ve been (physically) but I’m the author and I can do whatever I want, including reneging on whatever I like. And I’ve read and listened to the lyrics at least a dozen times in a row now and I’d just like to point out that it says “I’ll/You’ll Come Back” “When it’s over/when they call me/you.” That’s all.

Appreciated inadequacy

Quito-

We spent our second day at the church today and it was such and incredible experience. I think everyone was ready to go even this morning. After all week being awakened at 8:10, I found myself out of the shower and dressed at 8:08. I required a lot more coffee, and so did everyone else (especially after most of Coleman’s ended up on the floor) but the morning and the trip there were over in a flash.

Everyone was so excited to see us. They were lined up by the door and the energy just radiated out of everyone. It was also cool to greet people I actually knew and had worked and worshiped with yesterday.

We started off with devotion and it was really cool. Bible verses and “Purpose Driven Life” excerpts in back-and-forth Spanish and English. Then Anita and Julie did the same thing with a “letter from Jesus” while I played guitar and finally Roberto and I played 3 Spanish praise songs and “Trading My Sorrows” (which I ended with “Si Senior, Si Senior…” so it was pretty sweet).

When we broke up into groups, I started with Don Rodrigo, Bradham, and Coleman building a table. The gringos were terrible at it. Rodrigo would saw off pieces in three strokes and chisel and hammer like he was working with cheese instead of wood. And then we’d go behind him and totally screw it up. Eventually the table got finished but I feel like he could have done it in a quarter of the time without us.

After that I went back to help Julie and Hinter with the posters and got commandeered to get lunch. The kitchen was all torn up because they were preparing toi put in cabinets. SO a couple of women had cooked potato soup at their home up the hill. Coleman, Bradham a couple of kids from the church, and I trekked up (and it was pretty tough climbing before we had to carry soup). Then we end up going down with one person on either side of each of two gigantic pots of soup. We managed to make it back to Mission Emaus without spilling anything but our backs and arms were killing us. And here I am complaining about it when I don’t even live there and have to do stuff like that all the time.

Lunch was fabulous! Potato soup with avocado and (I think) little bits of chicken. Not like potato soup at home. In fact it really kind of defies description beyond “delicious.” We ate all interspersed, Ecuadorians and North Americans, and they even let Julie and Edla help serve. In fact, they had something else planned for lunch and Cameron talked them into the potato soup because the team loved it so much last year. Doesn’t sound like too much of a big deal if you aren’t familiar with the culture, but they were both big steps for a group that wants to serve us so much and has very different ideas firmly in their head about what is proper and what your place is in the world.

After lunch, Deborah and Maria conned me into playing soccer. The field was halfway back up the hill and there were two pigs and a cow there (and Deborah didn’t even come- what a hater). I played for a bit and spent a lot of time walking back and forth from the field to Anna on the hill with Priscilla dragging me by the arm or riding on my shoulders. Then we ended up sitting and talking with the boys asking Sophia and me about school and our names and what we wanted to do with our lives (“Mismo Lourdes” and “Come se dice…?” pointing to teeth to try to get across “Chaplain” and “Dentist” was pretty hilarious).

When we went back we played some games and the girls had some dancing lessons. It was great bonding even though I didn’t feel like I actually got much physical work done.

Finally we sang again and said good-bye. Don Rodrigo shook my hand, gave me a hug, and mimed playing guitar with a smile on his face. Even though I was so terrible at construction I felt like we could both appreciate each other’s different gifts. Pretty cool.

We came back to the hostel after dropping off Roberto for band practice. We hung around for about ten minutes and then Cameron came over and took us to this BBQ Express place to get shish-kebabs. (Seriously). They were really good, and so was the rest of the food (potatoes, corn with cheese and garlic sauce, cheese-stick-like-thingies, etc.). I actually sat and talked to Betty for the first time and that was pretty cool.

Then at last we came home to debrief. It’s become a pattern that we just laugh for 30 minutes before we get down to business. Conversation went from “de-thonging” to “underwater panties” to “Pikachu in the Christmas pageant” to a horrifyingly hilarious accidental inquiry into a group member’s virginity to finally actually about what happened today.

We talked about the warm, open culture here. How “besitos” affect our relationships. How we are surprised at the people’s faith and they are surprised at our efforts. How we feel inadequate but appreciated. How important relationships with little children, soccer games, and serving people food can be.

I got my two cents in, but I particularly enjoy listening to Sophia and Cameron and Deborah and Hunter. Especially their perspectives on the same things I notice or wonder, or how there are so many little connections like Sophia and I talking about getting outside our comfort zones and her talking about really trying to do that today.

Overall, I’m emotionally exhausted, and have a ton more pictures. Tomorrow we’re going to the Dump, La Red orientation, and the mall. I can’t wait.