Choir Tour 09

Planning and executing a travel event is one of the greatest pleasures of being a choir director. My earliest memory of taking a choir on tour involved a youth choir from the church where I served as summer youth director in 1981. I remember the bus going through a puddle at our first bathroom stop and shorting out its electrical system.

While I have a lot of memories of choir tours over the years, my current assistant was a youth in my previous church, and went on a lot of trips with me. And she remembers every detail of every trip. We had a long discussion on the bus yesterday, returning from this year's trip, and she helped me recall kids I had forgotten and repertoire I hadn't thought about in years. It was easy to see from her vivid memories that these experiences are very meaningful to our singers.

On this year's trip we went to New Orleans, where we sought to sing in recovering churches who lost so much to the flooding after hurricane Katrina. We were helped by a former member who lives in New Orleans now, and thanks to her planning we were able to fit a lot of things into a short time. We attended a couple of Mardi Gras Parades, visited the French Quarter, and saw a lot of sights. The people of the churches expressed a lot of joy and pleasure at being led in worship by a choir of teenagers, and hopefully they were encouraged in their challenging journey of recovery.

One of my most meaningful memories of a choir tour came years ago at another church. One of my closest kids and best singers came to me just before we started singing for a group of mentally challenged adults at a group home. He was upset, and said he wasn't sure he could sing that night. When I asked why, he said, "Well, you know that I'm adopted, right?" I replied that I did. He said, "Well, the reason I'm adopted is that my mother was mentally retarded. When she had a child they put it up for adoption. I was that child. And I can't help wondering if my mother will be in the audience tonight. She would be about the age of these people."

He sang. In fact, he sang his heart out. We'll never know, of course, if by some weird coincidence his birth mother might have heard him sing. But the point of the story is the context of honesty and surprise that were presented by the fact that we were on a choir tour in the first place. I learned a crucial part of the history of this young man, a kid with whom I was very close but obviously hadn't understood completely. And he came face to face with a reality that he was just getting old enough to understand. It helped him to voice his concerns. He wasn't really worried about singing. He was unprepared to see the face of his birth mother.

I returned last night from another tour, and everyone collected their things and jumped into their parents' cars. Of course, I went home to bed. During the night I heard my text message ringtone, and got up to see who was texting. It was the singer who had given us a lot of cause for worry a year ago because of some choices she made. Thanks to her great parents, our great Youth Minister, and her own determination, she has become one of our strongest and most mature leaders. And she was texting to thank me for taking her on this trip. While I know that the students were all glad to have gone, and some were even grateful, she was the only one to go out of her way to communicate her gratitude. Her text message communicated a lot more than "Thank you." It said, "I'm back, you can count on me." And it said, "Thanks for not giving up on me."

When we work hard to plan and execute a big project, the work and the success are certainly reward enough. But extra glimpses of the best and truest part of a student singer are priceless, and somehow traveling and singing create a context in which those moments can happen.