This last week presented an odd combination of stage fright scenarios for me.  Oddly, the things that used to scare me no longer bother me at all, and the things I used to do without breaking a sweat tied me up in knots this week.  As long as I can remember, I have been on stage, back stage, building the stage – you name a preposition that goes with stage, and I’ve probably been there as a dancer, a singer, an actor or a techie.  All through my childhood and into high school, I was a dancer and a singer.  I even managed to pull off a few solos without too much quaking of the boots.  I remember doing a capella auditions for All-State Choir and not really worrying about much other than finding the lucky audition dress and pronouncing all of the foreign language songs correctly.  Of course, I was a little nervous, but I don’t remember panicking.

In college, I was a theatre minor, so I had to audition and act on a somewhat regular basis.  I spent most of my time on various tech crews, but I was still required to audition for every show.  Singing and dancing were no big deal; acting, on the other hand, had been slightly terrifying for me since high school.  I never felt comfortable in character, and I had a hard time getting into character without feeling like I was playing dress up somehow.  Now I know that I really didn’t know myself well enough to slip someone else’s mask over my own character.  My favorite classes have always been the subjects that were the hardest: AP History, Composition with Dr. Metress, Chinese and Hebrew… My required acting class should have been in that list, but it always scared me to death: I knew that the professor would not like anything I did, and I couldn’t ever figure out how to improve my skills.  You can study harder to learn a language, but acting is tougher to study since it relies on experience as much as skill.  I finished the semester extremely proud of my B because I knew I was at best a mediocre actor.  I had found my niche as a director and a tech grunt.

Fast forward about a decade to this week.  Palm Sunday morning the church choir presented a worship musical, and I got to be a part of the praise team that sings out front.  No big deal, right?  I’ve been singing in small groups in front of people for decades now.  Wrong.  I don’t remember ever being so scared to sing in my life.  It’s funny now, but that Sunday morning, my throat was dry, my hands were shaking, and my stomach was grumbling its anxiety.  There is no logical reason for me to have been afraid except for the presence of a microphone directly in front of me.  I knew the music, I was singing with a group with the whole choir and orchestra behind me, and I was shaking in my clogs.  And right now, it makes me laugh to think of how tightly I had to grip the mic so that it didn’t shake out of my hand.  (Actually, it made me laugh to myself even while it was happening, but I was still helpless to stop it.)

Thursday night, we finished a two-night run of Journey to the Cross, which was a hybrid multimedia/drama production based loosely on the stations of the cross.  It was a walk-through event with a clip from The Passion of the Christ at each stop along with a monologue from a character in the story acting as an eyewitness.  The sets were well done, and we had a great cast of actors and supporting church members to put it all together.  I played Mary, and I performed my monologue in front of around 500 people in total.  There were something like 30 small groups, so we all performed the monologues at least 30 times in two nights.  Based on my acting experience in college, this was the event that should have scared me.  And yet… my biggest fear was not getting all the actors made up on time or the special effects makeup coming off before the end of the night.  Acting in front of hundreds of people?  No big deal.  I even mangled a few of the lines and recovered without panicking or alerting the audience to my mistakes.

I’d like to say that it’s a testament to the vast improvement in my stagecraft since college.  While there’s no doubt I’m a much better actress now that I’ve lived more of life and come to know myself far better than I did in college, I’m no dummy.  There were easily dozens of people praying for this production on a daily basis.  And I learned last week that one group was praying specifically for my role as Mary.  There is certainly no doubt whatsoever that I was never worried because of the effect of those prayers.  God honors the work that we offer up to him, and there were a lot of sacrifices involved for a lot of people to make this production possible.  But most of all, God honors the hearts that submit to him, and we could not have been this successful without those folks who committed to pray for every aspect of Journey to the Cross.  The experience of playing Mary is not one I’ll ever forget, but not because it was a good role or because it was exciting to get to play any part on stage: this experience reminded me how much the Church (not just Green Valley) is a unified body.  We each have a role to play, and we each are a necessary part in the Body of Christ.  We can’t all be heads and eyes – some of us are hands, feet, or even armpits.  Whatever we are designed to be, there is a gap that must be filled when any part of the body refuses to act.  I won’t pretend that I’m never part of that gap, but I know I served my purpose in this production.  I thoroughly enjoy working backstage – being the hands and feet of a production without having to be the face of it.  It was an honor to be a face this time and still know how much work behind the scenes went into putting the actors out onto the stage.  It was also a huge reminder that I am not as consistent in my prayer life as I am called to be.  It was a humbling reminder of how tiny each of us is in the grand scheme of things, yet how great we are when we function as one body.

Without adding any details, there is a situation I have to deal with fairly constantly.  We will call it “the Zebra” for the rest of this post so that I don’t have to find creative synonyms for “situation” or try to vaguely describe an interpersonal conflict.  The Zebra is inescapable and largely unconfrontable.  Most of the zebras in my life are workable for the most part, and they don’t seem to present the same level of angst this Zebra causes me in under a minute.  I am at a complete loss for actionable direction, and I am struggling to find both a Christlike response and a confirmation that Christ even exists in this situation.  (Please hold all the rotten tomatoes until you finish reading – I am not saying that Christ does not exist.)

The root of the problem with the Zebra is actually a problem with myself, although there is much that ideally should change with the Zebra.  The root problem is that I am feeble-hearted: I cannot always outrun the feeling that I am a failure because I have miscarried six times; I can run hard and fast, but the inadequacy will catch me when I least expect it.  Unfortunately, I thought I had enough breathing room to stop running for a while, and now I am fighting for air again.  I also feel like I have failed when I can’t accomplish all of the things that I need to do, not to mention the things that I would like to do, which happens just about every day.  Even though I know that what I do does not make up all of who I am, I find myself lost in the to-do list and wondering if I will ever get anything right.  The Zebra only magnifies my feelings of failure.  I would venture to guess that none of the parties involved in the Zebra even know how I feel, partly because I don’t know how to tell them, and partly because they won’t ask.

It seems that the more I ponder the situation, the deeper root of my frustration is that I rarely feel adequate, which is ridiculous because I know that I am a very capable person.  My entire life is built on the foundation that I am a creation of God, who loved me enough to die for me so that I can know him and worship him forever.  That should be enough.  That should render the Zebra miniscule and incapable of causing me frustration and pain.  So, why does the Zebra hold such power over me?  The first thing that pops into my head is that my faith is inadequate.  I allow the Zebra to invade more ground than it should hold in my heart and my mind, and certainly I could work harder to devote my entire thought life to Christ.  But the Zebra has proven that no matter how hard I try to accept its inane presence in my life and chalk up the injuries it causes to the Zebra’s untrained nature, the Zebra manages to do something so outrageous that I can’t pretend it is an acceptable situation at all.

Here is the difficulty in finding Christ in this situation: it feels like I am being pushed past what I can handle, and there appear to be no viable coping strategies.  It would be a simple thing to handle if Christ were more tangible in this situation, but I can’t see or hear or feel the directions for taming the Zebra that he must be providing.  And I can’t decide what action Jesus would take here: continue to turn the other cheek or turn over tables in the temple.  The other cheek option is causing no end of stress and dysfunction in my life.  Turning over tables would likely permanently damage some relationships that would then cause no end of stress and dysfunction in my life.  I am terribly afraid of the fallout from any real confrontation with the Zebra, but I don’t know that I can continue to pretend everything is fine with a Zebra running amuck.

I can completely see that I am following in Job’s mistaken footsteps: by questioning God’s motives and his control over the Zebra, I am really deflecting any serious introspection and weakening my focus on God’s character.  I do have the advantage of supportive friends, and I know that God uses them to encourage me in a very tangible way.  But like Job, my fatal flaw is wanting the Zebra to just go away so that God will prove that I am righteous in my pain and indignation.  Alas, there are no such magic bullets, and if I have learned nothing else in the last few years, I have learned that God doesn’t work that way most of the time, and I probably couldn’t love him if he did.  I just want to hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” and I wish I could hear it right now; it would make it a lot easier to tell my feeble heart to buck up and keep going.

I know, but I couldn’t help myself with the title.  For most of my life, I have sung in choir.  In fact, I earned a perfect attendance award one year in the church children’s choir; I mention that award because it was one of my proudest achievements until a freakish P.E. award in middle school – but that’s another post.  I learned from the band director within the first week of middle school that I had no rhythm (and he was right – I can’t clap and sing at the same time), and if I couldn’t play drums or a trumpet, I wasn’t interested in the band, thus sealing my fate as a choir member.

In high school, I continued to sing in the concert choir and the show choir (think Glee without all the angst and obvious sex).  I still reference most of my time in high school by the pieces we were singing in choir: “Odysseus and the Sirens,” Hilaritas, “Johnny Be Good,” Cole Porter, and Bach chorales.  I sang in assorted choirs all through college, but after getting married and moving to a new church, I never joined the choir.  I sang with the ensemble in Christmas productions, but I hadn’t been in choir in almost ten years until I started going to practice in the fall.  I am officially a second soprano now, which has been an adjustment from a lifetime of alto and occasional tenor singing, but I can hit most of the notes, and my eyes have almost gotten used to watching the director from the other side of the loft.  Adjustments aside, I feel like I’m home in the choir for a lot of reasons.

A good piece of music is a microcosm of the body of Christ: it is a collective effort that cannot be accomplished by one person alone, and everyone involved has a different job to do.  There must be a composer, a director, people to play the instruments, people to sing the parts, and people to hear the song.  Every Sunday morning in the choir loft, I am reminded at some point that I am one voice among many, and I can identify the individual voices in my section along with the harmonies of the other sections.  It is extraordinary to hear the individuals become one collective voice, and it must be a little bit like what heaven will be.  One of my favorite exercises in high school choir was standing in a big circle around the room to sing whatever piece we were working on; wherever you stood in the circle, you heard every part as if it were a single voice.  The piece I most remember from that exercise is “The Last Words of David;” our director told the accompanist to play, and then she turned all of the lights off.  The first phrase was like a wall of sound with all these crazy chords that gave us all chill bumps.  I think that’s still my favorite choral piece, even after everything I have heard or sung since then, and I will never forget how it sounded that day in the dark.

As amazing as it was to sing with such an incredible group of voices in high school, it is even better to be singing with our church choir.  They, too, are an amazingly talented bunch, but the focus is not on winning competitions or competing for solos: we are there to tell about God’s love through music.  And I feel like the choir members demonstrate that love by the way they care for each other.  Of course there are all of the foibles and follies that humans are prone to – you can’t put people in a room together and never have disagreements or personality conflicts – but this is a group that prays for each other and expresses genuine concern for each other in spite of all the different personalities and ages and professions present in such a large group.  It doesn’t hurt that our director leads by example, either.

My work day was insane yesterday.  I had (make that still have) an enormous pile of paperwork on my desk and several fires to put out through the day, so by the time I left for choir practice, I was frazzled to say the least.  Once we started singing, though, the mess of the day was gone, and I was home.

Court reporting has always been the most mysterious part of a courtroom to me.  I am a hunt-and-peck typist, and all of my efforts to learn correct typing skills have resulted in frustration and laughter from Mavis Beacon.  She’s a really mean computer program, I tell you… okay, mostly because I enabled sound effects that apparently mock you when you hit a wrong key or type too slowly.  I never took typing or keyboarding in school, either.  It may shock you to learn that my elective schedule was too full with art class, math team, choir, and Spanish.  I have honed my hunt-and-peck skills, so that you probably wouldn’t notice that I can’t type without looking at the keyboard, but my speed severely limits my ability to take dictation of any kind.  Understandably, court reporting is out of the realm of possibilities for me: you not only have to type at the speed of conversation, but you also have to know and understand a special shorthand.  Maybe it is the magic of motion pictures, but I am always astounded when the court reporter on a television show reads back several minutes of dialogue from what appears to be three inches of adding machine tape.

But we all have forms of shorthand that we use every day.  For instance, if you have a profession, there are terms that you use that apply strictly to your trade.  Every hobby you have requires a working knowledge of the craft or activity you are attempting to complete.  I recall looking at the information for the triathlon I conned my best friend into entering with me, and wondering, “What in the world does T1 and T2 mean?”  All I knew up to that point was swim, bike, run (What do you mean I have to transition?!).

Sometimes, shorthand can be a barrier to real communication.  Many regular church attendees, especially in the Bible Belt, have a hard time avoiding “religious” or “church” words when they are talking to someone who isn’t familiar with the lingo.  “I was backsliding until I repented of my sins and rededicated my life.”  Chances are, if you’re not Southern Baptist, you don’t really understand what that meant.  I would guess that even if you did understand it, you fall into one of two camps: Camp A which sees no issue with defaulting to the lingo, or Camp B which is frustrated by the lingo because it so often falls short of truly expressing the heart and soul of your faith.  I suppose it’s evident that my tent is pitched in Camp B.  The problem with exclusionary shorthand is that you prevent an outsider from coming into your campground and staying long enough to roast marshmallows around the fire.  I can think of nothing that should be more clearly communicated than the truth of who God is and how he loves us, yet we often entangle ourselves in the semantics or catch phrases.

But shorthand can be useful, too.  In the church example, there is an amazing shorthand among followers of Christ: there is (or should be) an immediate family connection, and they already know the most important things about you without asking a single question.  If you tell me you follow Christ, then I already know you are my brother or sister in faith, and the rest is just details as the saying goes.  I have some beautiful friendships that have developed on that foundation alone.  This blog has also provided a shorthand among my friends.  It allows me to share more than I would either be willing or able to do in a quick conversation, which means that most of my quick conversations have immediately started on a deeper level.  It has allowed others to share things they probably wouldn’t have otherwise, which offers me a shorthand to their struggles, too.  It has turned us into court reporters of the heart, if you will, and that quick and deep plunge into friendship is priceless.

Several months ago, I purchased a pair of Vibram Five Fingers shoes.  In case you haven’t seen them, they are pictured here (made even more obnoxious by the addition of striped socks – I am on a mission to find more toed socks today as all the toed socks I own are some variation of stripes or hearts).  I personally find these shoes to be the most comfortable pair I own; it feels like walking around in your socks all day.  I’ve had a really bad case of plantar fasciitis among all of the other issues my feet have had from birth, and, rather counterintuitively, walking and running in these shoes or barefoot is helping tremendously.  However, I do not recommend these shoes to anyone without a healthy sense of humor and at least a small dose of confidence, for you will be mocked.

My Five Fingers have been conversation starters as well as the butt of many jokes around the office (I now wave goodbye to my office roommate with my toes whenever I’m wearing them) and various checkout lines.  I have adopted a new motto regarding my footwear, though: Blessed are you who are mocked for your choice in shoes, for your feet shall not ache nor blister.  Perhaps slightly sacrilegious, but true in my case.  I tend to forget what they look like, so I forget that other people might be surprised by my footwear.

So, last weekend while I was waiting for a pickup order at a steakhouse restaurant, I was not surprised to see someone glaring with disapproval and horror at the outline of my toes.  What made this situation downright hilarious was the disgusted woman’s attire: plaid pajama pants, hooded sweatshirt, and FUZZY PINK FLIP FLOP SLIPPERS!  I barely avoided snorting with laughter when I caught her looking at my shoes because I thought, “At least I have on real pants,”  and then, “Pot, meet kettle.”

That moment has made me laugh all week, but it also made me think about how many times we do that on a daily basis.  How often do I disdain someone in spite of all of my foibles and imperfections?  I honestly try not to criticize someone else without considering my faults first.  I suppose I have this cartoon-like image of myself with a plank in my eye holding tweezers to someone else’s eye.  I don’t always succeed at thinking before critiquing, and I know I fail most often with my husband and my family.  But the look on that woman’s face coupled with her similarly ridiculous choice in footwear demonstrated the absurdity of passing judgment on others.  It appears that we’re all just a bunch of pots calling kettles black.