The Solid Rock
The traditional hymn, from our hymnal.
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The Solid Rock
This is the traditional hymn The Solid Rock, taken straight from our hymnal but moving through the sections of the choir for interest.
When I wrote last Friday about “Down Time”, I had no idea if I would be singing with the choir the following Sunday, or staying in bed, or something in between. I also did not know that I was not the only choir member to miss the rehearsal because of illness. It seems that a minor plague swept through the church following Easter.
For me it was only a cold, one that I stopped dead in its tracks a day after it started, using my mother’s method of staying good and warm and toughing it out, without benefit of over-the-counter “remedies”. (Chicken soup would have been good, but I didn’t have any.) For quite a few other people whatever it is has been more persistent than that.
I really don’t like missing choir. I don’t go out of the house very much any more, and I can’t do the amount of volunteer work that I used to do, and the singing is important to me. When Saturday came and the illness did not return, I became kind of obsessed with being there to sing on Sunday.
I also don’t like showing up for the service without having had an opportunity to rehearse, but I had received enough information via email by then to know that it would not be a problem as long as I came in extra-early and practiced during the service run-through, which I did.
I began to see the complete picture when I arrived Sunday morning and half the rest of the choir did not arrive. And not just the choir. Attendance was down, generally. We altos were two this morning, a record I would rather not tie or exceed (especially). Sometimes obsession can be a good thing.
In the interest of picking up as much of us as possible with the mics, we brought the third row of the choir, including me, down to the second row, and moved some of the second row to the first, with us lonely altos on the left side of the center isle. It looks reasonably good on camera, ignoring how small the choir is, and it sounds like it worked.
Something odd happened at the ending. I was right there in the middle of it (literally the center) and I don’t know what it was. It might have been a sound system failure of some kind. We suddenly couldn’t hear ourselves or anybody else as we completed the piece.
Some days are like this. I was just happy to be there.
I have found a way, using updated software, to again be able to download anthems the same day that they are recorded. YouTube made changes to its livestream format quite some time ago that broke both of my downloaders such that I could only download livestreams the following day or thereafter. Now one of them works the same day again, while I don’t have any updates for the other and this particular feature remains broken.
I tend to have more time for doing this on Sunday than during the week, so perhaps these posts will now be more regularly timed.
Recorded at Christ Community Church, Carmichael, California, April 7, 2024
Excerpted from this livestream.
That was a familiar song to me and then I realized that the church that I went to as a child sang it very often. Back then we went to church Sunday morning and Sunday evening and then Wednesday evening for praying and singing. Thanks for the blast from the past!!