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Those of you who have worked with me or close to me {especially in my early self-employment years} know that I’m not opposed to taking unusual payment. I guess in that sense I’m very old fashioned. The kind of girl who could accept a dozen eggs for an hour of cow milking. Okay, so–maybe that exact deal never happened anywhere. Ever.
But I have been known to accept the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookies, meals, banquet tickets, and {recently} a Muppet-esque puppet made to my likeness. {It’s not quite done but I promise I’ll show it to you when I get it.}
My most recent barter was exchanging some graphic design for two tickets to a local positive music festival called Rock the Leaves. If you live here in Practically Canada you should check them out. They put a second event on in the spring called Beardstock, which I’ve heard had a pretty cool promo in the Rock the Leaves program.
You got me. I made that. To be fair–I genuinely do think it looks cool.
As part of my payment I got a VIP experience with this year’s headliner: Sanctus Real. I took a friend and together with the other VIP ticket holders we got to hear Santus Real play two songs from their new album acoustically followed by a question and answer time, followed by photo and autograph time.
Something they said in response to one audience question really stood out to me. A man asked what the best part of their job is as a touring band. In response, lead singer, Matt Hammitt, told us that the absolute best part is when they meet up with people from the audience who share how God has used their music to speak to them. He told us that he uses song writing as a way to cope with hard times and turn to God. He said he loves learning how God has used the words He inspired to work in others’ lives.
I love that. So what I’ve been mulling over is the idea that we all have songs and music running through our lives. Maybe not literally–believe me, no one wants me to write a song, much less sing it. But our struggles, the way we move in times of hardship, our testimonies, the stories we share, the words we use…these comprise our song. The same way God can use their music to reach someone, help them, pick them up, direct them, affirm them–He can use our lives’ songs to do the same to all the people we see and interact with.
It’s a ripple effect and I believe most of us will never know just how far our ripples have spread. Hard times are…well…hard, but if we use our free will to choose to continue to proclaim the goodness of the Lord, He will carry our song far and wide. The strain of a trial and the victory found afterward become our song, a song that can speak volumes to an unknown mass.
