I mowed twenty three lawns that Monday. I had time to run home and shower, put some nice clothes on, and head to Jewelry Television to help setup in the auditorium for the Musical Review. It was a fundraiser for a company I work for, so it was work. I was still in the work mindset, and after loading some gear in and out, and folding some programs (not my best work), that hadn’t changed. I wasn’t excited. “Let’s get this done, make some money, and try to be home in time to say goodnight to my son,” I thought. The grease under my fingernails from my other job that day agreed that the content of the evening was rather pointless: a bunch of show tunes, cookies and lemonade, nothing really added to the world, right? Like a piece of art hanging on a wall, it’s just there. You can’t eat it, you can’t talk to it (at least, that would be weird), it serves no practical purpose.
About three songs in, I had already experienced tears and goose bumps. It was as if someone used a degreaser on the unattended depths of my heart, as if I had never felt anything before now.I felt like the Tin Man from a Christopher Nolan remake of the Wizard of Oz, highlighting the gritty reality of life before having a heart. To steal the phrase from this one dirty hippy surfer in Australia, it was like “meaningful play.” He spoke about how surfing doesn’t serve any direct purpose. It’s not a meal, you have nothing to show for it, but somehow it makes all the difference in your life and gets you through the hardest of times. That’s what I felt at the Musical Review. These songs, these stories, the lives they represented, seemed to connect us the way God always intended us to be connected. We felt each other’s burdens and joys, carrying them together as they were brought into the light. The unlovable circus people, the dying Civil War soldier, the isolated Hunchback, the lonely waitress—we were all on the same page, for an hour and a half, or as long as the songs stayed in our head.