The Song in Your Heart

Hello friends 🙂

It’s been a while. I posted this on my Facebook page and thought it might be appropriate to also post it here. Surprisingly, I still get quite a few people visiting the blog even though I haven’t posted in a while. That makes me happy that the hard work we did for a decade is still being read, and people are benefiting from it.

I hope you are well. I always love hearing from you and enjoy getting emails from people who used to regularly read here. Happy Holidays! ~Julie Anne

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Last night, a group got together and sang the first part of Handel’s Messiah and the Hallelujah chorus. We didn’t have a practice. Was it polished? No. Was it fun? Yes. The cool thing was we all sang through the soloist pieces. I’m a true alto, but got to stretch my vocal cords from tenor to 1st Soprano.

On my way home, I stopped by the grocery store and there was music playing in the background – songs that I knew and loved, so I started singing out loud, just loud enough so that if you walked by me, you’d definitely hear it. And, I.did.not.care.

This morning, I was thinking about how wonderful it was to sing last night and how happy it made me feel.

Quite a few of my Facebook friends know me because of choirs we’ve sung in together as a child (as young as 5th grade!), or of choirs in which I have accompanied (looking at you, former Aloha HS and Richland HS students ), or praise and worship teams, or Mid-Columbia Mastersingers.

My beginning in music started when I was a toddler and my mom caught me going to the piano and playing familiar songs by ear. So, I’ve been doing this thing for over a half a century. It’s part of who I am.

But for a while, the music stopped. And I did not even realize it.

I remember one day I was with my eldest son, James, and as he was getting out of the car, he nonchalantly said, “why aren’t you singing to ‘Caboose’ (youngest child) the way you sang to the rest of us?”

I always sang to my kids, and with each successive child that entered the family, they were serenaded by love and song by the older kids and me.

But not so much for Caboose, at least by me.

As James continued to walk into the house, I remained in the car. That one question shattered me. I lost it.( I can hardly type this because the grief still hits me.)

My child, my youngest child, who was 3 or 4 years old had missed all of those precious years of being sung to. He missed being showered with love and joy through music.

I was absolutely devastated and dumbfounded.

And then the reality hit me: you sing when you are happy.

I was not happy. My heart was broken and the environment in which I was living was not conducive to having a happy heart to be able to sing spontaneously. I did have moments of singing/playing as I got involved with choirs or accompanying, but rarely did I sing spontaneously.

That has now changed. I can and do sing/play the piano spontaneously.

If you have lost the song in your heart, do a quick check. Are you in a safe place so that you can sing? If not, I would like to encourage you to do what it takes to live in a safe place where the joy will come back in your life. It is so worth it, and more importantly, YOU are worth it.