God's Sufficient Grace

Middle School Concert

If I wondered at the Prong Jai concert on Thursday morning going off without any mishaps of any kind, I was later to find out that God was just saving them for the evening! I think my part of the Middle School concert will forever be considered in my mind as the "concert of calamities"!

I had to leave Prong Jai soon after the concert was over to come back to a mid-morning 6th grade strings dress rehearsal for the Middle School concert that evening (my 5th graders will play next week). By the time I got back to Bangna, I had a terrible headache which also made me feel sick to my stomach. I pressed on through the dress rehearsal but found myself getting extremely frustrated with out-of-tune violins and a bridge on one of my student's violins which had fallen and didn't want to stay back up (I ended up just letting him borrow the school's violin for the rehearsal, saying that I'd fix it before the evening). I was pretty brain-dead the rest of the school day and tried to get a few things done, then went back to my apartment and slept off some of the headache that afternoon (it didn't completely leave until Friday mid-day). I arrived early for the concert to tune everyone's violins again, but didn't get there early enough. The one student's violin bridge fell another 3 or 4 times before it finally snapped in half! "Well," I thought, "I guess this means he'll be using the school violin for the concert!" 15 minutes before the concert was to begin, I realized that my music and all of the student's music that I was keeping was in my apartment! I had accidently taken it out of my bag with a stack of other things. To make matters worse, I had lent my apartment keys to a friend so she could use my shower before the concert (since I live on campus), so I had to go find her, walk with her to her classroom (in the 2nd floor of another building) where she had put my keys, rush up to my 4th floor apartment to get the music and run back to the auditorium (all in high heels). I made it back before the concert began but the whole thing made me flustered and rather sweaty (it was a hot evening). Our plan was for my violinists to sit together on the first row and then walk up to the front of the stage in their chamber groups at the appropriate times, but right before the concert began, when we tried to slip into the actual auditorium, we discovered we were locked out! So we stayed backstage for the first 1/3rd of the concert and had to change our approach for walking on the stage. Then as the first group (the "Indian boys quintet" and me!) were lining up to walk out, we realized one of the students wasn't there! In the chaos, I hadn't realized he was missing and had assumed earlier that he was in another room practicing with the choir. So for the concert we were the "Indian Boys Quartet" and Miss Catherine.

As to the actual performance, the students' pieces held together (for some of the groups, a miracle in itself!) and all in all sounded better than they had in the past, although not where I wish they were at this point. I played with two of the groups (to help hold them together) and was rather nervous as it was one of my first performances on the violin! The students were pleased with the way they played, I think, so I guess the important things happened, but what a trip to get there! It was the kind of night where I could either laugh or cry at all that happened - and this time God gave me the grace to laugh! : )

posted by Catherine Rogers @ 3:31 AM