for the love of God

Today, one of our "yutes" performed at Fine Arts Festival. Eric and I brought a host of other yutes up to cheer him on during his performance, and we continued on through the "celebration service" where winners were announced and the "meritorial award" winners performed their gigs on site.

It was pretty cool--I'd never been involved growing up since I lived in Africa--and even though our guy didn't place this year, I really hope we can push this to our group for next year. Best part of today, besides hearing our guy rock his performance (he SHOULD have placed!!!) was watching how he took not placing and going on to nationals. He at least didn't show his disappointment, and he took it like a champ. Good news: he's a sophomore this year, so he has two more years, and a whole lot of time to polish his work and style. Also, he's only been writing since about November of 2011--and he's amazing already!

A lot of the students that come to our youth group are wicked talented. We have dancers and singers and musicians and artists and one of the gals placed second last year in vocal talent, was invited to nationals, and didn't enter this year. (WHAT?!) That said, my creative juices started flowing, and I really want to push these guys and gals to be confident in their talents, to show their talents to the world, and to use them to glorify God.

Caroling, caroling through the snow...

This past weekend, Eric and I had the privilege of caroling with a group of friends for Kirkland's Tree Lighting Ceremonies. We spent four hours rotating from stage to stage in the downtown area, singing in the very cold weather. It was a lot of fun, we even got to sing in my hotel's lobby and in an art gallery and coffee shop, and then we got a free dinner at a local Greek restaurant as part of the deal. Woot!

Anyway, the Downtown Kirkland Association put together a little video on the event and they put our group as the musical background! You can see me in the little video clip thrown in the middle of the slideshow. Also, forgive that not quite high G at the end of the song. Both sopranos in the group (myself being one of them) are solid second sopranos, and after singing for that long in the cold, our voices just didn't quite hold out.



Either way, we all had a blast and got rave reviews. In fact, they've already asked us to come back and sing again for ambiance for holiday shoppers, only this time, they're willing to pay us. Cool, eh? No final details worked out, so who knows if it'll actually happen, but it was a really neat experience. :)

Side note: when picking songs to sing for these types of events, don't throw a socialist type song like Good King Wenceslas into the mix when singing to a very bourgeois crowd. I swear we got crickets every time...

Side note 2: everyone loved that we sang Carol of the Bells. EVERYONE.