The Perfect Storm

When I began my career, I was teaching – a pretty individualistic pursuit. I got to set my own agenda, and I was responsible for my own success. Then I became a programmer and joined a small company, which slowly grew into a larger company, and was eventually swallowed up by one of the largest corporations in the universe.

Now that I’m a tiny cog in an enormous wheel – a guy with a 9-digit employee ID – I have to get used to the corporate way of thinking. One aspect of that is the reliance on buzzwords. Corporations are the folks who gave you task, purpose, and leverage as verbs, you know. One of our favorites, actually, is “synergy” – the concept of multiple factors working together in such a way that the whole exceeds the sum of its parts.

I will not try anyone’s patience by linking to my previous entries; but anyone who’s read this all along knows that I love music, and I love God, and I love kids. So you would think, in the name of synergy, that leading music at Vacation Bible School would be an absolute slam-dunk for me.

Over the years, however, I have come to the place where my least favorite sentence is, “Would you consider leading music at VBS?” Well, it probably runs a close second to, “Honey, did you do everything on the list I left this morning?” But that may be a discussion for another day.

Actually, VBS music is an excellent example of synergy, much like the recent bestseller and movie, The Perfect Storm… a confluence of an assortment of difficult circumstances. For example, I do love kids; I’m really excellent – with a few. Perhaps not so much with 60 or 80 eight-year-olds.

Now it appears to me that VBS publishing is a pretty big business, but in order to keep selling a new package every year, they have to keep coming up with new songs every year. And I mean new – it’s very rare that even the adults know any of the songs that come in the package; forget about the kids.

So we stick the words up on the wall, and we play a CD really loud, and we run through each one a few times, and we hope that somehow the kids can jump on a moving bus. And of course, it’s extremely helpful that probably half of them are actually under 8 and really can’t read the words anyway. Actually, that’s kind of a moot point: if you’ve ever had 80 or so kids in one room… you have my condolences. But I’ll bet my CD player and my overhead projector that if you did, they weren’t all attending to the same task, or for that matter all facing the same direction.

All of this is a little hard on my Musician side. When I do get… enlisted… to do the music, I tend to get a little over-focused on the idea of Leading Singing. I sometimes forget that the point isn’t really to get them singing, but rather:

• to let them hear the songs – maybe even get them stuck in their heads for a later date
• to get them focused on the theme of the evening or the week
• to get them excited about what we’re doing... or more accurately, to redirect the teeming mass of energy already in the room in the right direction.

Somehow it all works together, almost despite the music and certainly despite me. We just concluded our week, with someone else leading music, and the kids (and even the staff) had a great time. Looks like we have synergy working for us after all.