Just a quick thought before I head out to do a show

You have no idea how many things I have either resisted doing or else forced myself to do simply becuase today I am playing Jesus for our last Godspell, Jr show. But I'm supposed to be playing Jesus every day, aren't I? People should think I'm like Jesus all the time. Why don't I think of it that way every other day of the year?

What I Did Today

Everything is blackness.

Well, not everything.

Everything I can see may be black, but my other senses are having the time of their lives. I can smell sawdust, the faint smell that scotch tape makes when it is placed on your face, and my own sweat. All of these sensations are thick, hanging over and around my head. I can feel the rough planks around me. There are only hard angles in this almost-coffin.

The parallel stops my breathing for a minute, but I push it away and breathe deeply. I am not locked inside, unsure though I am of how much air takes up the space around me. I can hear footsteps coming nearer. This is unexpected. I wait for a voice to be attached to the feet that have stopped just in front of me.

"I'm going to move you now."

Before I can respond, I am moving forward faster than I would like. I hope it is forward. After the first few feet, I have lost all sense of direction. The darkness comes to an abrupt stop. I hear the voice (which I now recognize as being named Will) shouting to someone else. His voice slowly leaves the range of my hearing, and I am left once again to myself in the darkness.

Minutes later, another pair of footsteps, another voice. I shall soon emerge.

Et tu, Judas?

So the other night we performed Godspell at the Methodist Church in my hometown. The title of this post is a line that I thought of during the most serious part of the play, and I had spent the last four musical numbers building up emotion for the scene. Then suddenly this line comes to my head and the tiniest bit of mirth surfaces. I hate my mind sometimes. But I pushed it down right away. It would be the perfect line... if it wasn't supposed to be serious.

I prayed before the show, asking God to help make this my best possible portrayal of Jesus (in part because it would be my second-to-last time doing it). As far as I could tell, it was, but we can never please everyone, can we? My sister Sophie cried through the whole finale and afterward because she thought I had actually died. Even when I completely succeed, I feel horrible. Shucks.

Great stuff going down musically lately. heretoday performed at my friend's church, but that was yesterday. And today we're gone. We're talking about doing a Christmas show with lots of Relient K and Trans-Siberan, which should be fun. A few things went wrong, as they always do, but nothing horrible. The sub-par sound quality of the video hopefully disguises the fact that my amp inexplicably stopped working when I switched on the distortion. That's why you can see me playing during the bridge of "Hey" but all you can hear are drums. Emily started the piano solo two beats slow, but Charles saved it halfway through for us. We had a great time, though, and people worshipped. Hooray!

For some stupid reason, the video of the song that we performed virtually flawlessly was corrupted. Ah well. We did okay on this one.