If you wonder why I am writing about music ask to see my iPhone and look at my music lists! I'm holding around 1200+ songs!!! Most would say that's a bit excessive but for me, I wish I had more space!
I started singing many many years ago. I can remember as a small boy with a plastic stringed guitar singing my heart out to old classics like "swingin" and "he stopped loving her today"!
I grew up listening to the Gaithers and the Imperials playing on my grandma Mosley's radio in her house. And hearing her and two of her friends sing together on Sundays at church back in Arkansas. How beautiful her voice was! There are times that I can hear her still singing "because He lives" or "in the garden" or "Holy ground" She was instrumental in planting the seed for God's music in my life!
When we moved to Alabama in 1991 we moved into a town house for a short time and as luck would have it we lived next door to my first school choir director.
I'll never forget Mr Jerry Toole. He was the one that encouraged me to step out and join the school choir in the 7th grade. At that time I had never sang in public or with anyone else before and it was all so new to me. It wasn't long after that I started singing solos in church and with some other grown men performing quartet music.
By the time I had finished high school I was an All State choir member, been invited to sing in college choirs as a junior, one of two in the whole state, and then I just stopped.
I sang a few times over the next few years but it just wasn't the same anymore. I sang in churches, bars, clubs, and the shower. But I had lost the joy that I had originally felt singing all those years ago.
It wasn't til a few years back when I had started dating my wonderful wife Dena, that I rediscovered the "joy" I had felt as a boy.
It was an Easter Sunday service and I had been asked to sing with three other men from our church. The song was "Arise My Love" made famous by the group Newsong. I like to think we did it justice but what meant most to me was the feeling of closeness to God. A closeness that I hadn't felt in many many years.
King David used to sing and dance just for the sheer joy of being in God's presence and that is what I felt and I can say honestly I have felt it everytime since that day. I feel it in the car, I feel it when I am shaving(which is harder than you think), and I especially feel it when I am just singing praise songs on Sunday morning with my church family in worship.
I often times wonder why God gave me the love of music and then I am reminded as I was then that there will be singing in heaven. To be honest there are days that I can't wait because I know it will be new music that I have never heard before but will know by heart.
Tomorrow we will gather together as a body of believers at First Baptist in Pell City, Alabama and I will have to honor to stand before my Lord and Savior and sing praises to his name! If I was to become suddenly famous for my singing I don't know if I would feel as close to my Lord as I do standing with 250+ others brothers and sisters just singing His praises.
Thank you God for giving me a second chance to sing for you and not for men!
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