My love affair with music

for my birthday this summer, my son decided to give me his ipod…the one that i had given to him last christmas. he says its too big and he’d rather have a smaller one. i’m ok with the deal. over the past month, i’ve grown more fond of it everyday.

i love music. in my freshman year of college, back in the dark ages, i was a music major. i started playing a trumpet when i was in fourth grade and kept playing it all the way through high school. in college, my original dream was to be a concert french horn player. no joke.

in my second year of college, god really got ahold of my heart and things began to change. one of those changes had to do with music. it was the early seventies, and rock and roll was changing the landscape where young people were living. that included me.

in the midst of my personal spiritual journey, i began to be captured by the new music styles that were creeping into my traditional church experience. my life was a fixture in the worship wars that were beginning to be fought in sanctuaries around the country. i didn’t mean to cause problems, but i’m sure my love of new music (and its entrance into the worship experience of my home church) was very threatening and extremely uncomfortable to the older folks.

anyway, i quickly learned that it was a whole lot easier to lead worship around a campfire with a guitar, instead of a trumpet. so i eschewed my beloved olds recorder (trumpet) and purchased my first guitar and began my lifelong process of teaching myself how to play it.

there’s a lot more to this story. a lot.