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On the Road with the Rehoboth Choir
When aging teachers get pooped, they'll sometimes grab a huge breath and say things like, "Well, at least it keeps you young," it meaning working with kids. Even though this old teacher has "worked with kids" for just about forty years, I'm not always sure that old line holds much water. Not long ago, I felt ancient, withered, shell-shocked--just plain wiped out.
For several days I traveled along with Rehoboth’s incredible high school choir. One day, the kids and their marvelous leaders did three assemblies in two elementary schools on the Rosebud Reservation--three school assembles BEFORE noon. Just watching them hold those kids' attention through the magical musical shenanigans made me feel like a dishrag. And then this: the moment they were through--even before they had lunch!— in the gym at St. Francis, one of the kids picked up a basketball and a dozen of them started playing ball—that’s right, shooting hoops.
After four days with those kids, I swear I'm not a minute younger. It took me two full days of total collapse to feel as if the ship of my state had been somehow righted.
But I loved it.
One night, at a little church in Mission, South Dakota, before the concert, the pastor told me that recently the deaths of two young people had added to the incredible suicide rate among the Rosebud Sioux—higher there than almost anywhere in the nation. Just incredible.
The concert that night, like all the others, was electric. When it wasn't haunting in its beauty, it exploded in excitement, every last minute perfectly lit by smiles on the Rehoboth kid’s faces, smiles as wide as the Dakota reservation sky.
When it was over, the pastor, who's been preaching at that church for a decade, couldn't stop praising the Lord for the testimony he'd just heard, just couldn’t stop. He told the Rehoboth kids he wasn't sure whether they really understood what they'd done with all that joy they created, what their joy might mean to the kids that night, and the hundreds they would be singing for the next day. That pastor just couldn't stop praising the Lord--a chorus of Amens, an echoing roll of triumphant hallelujahs.
I'm not Lakota and I'm not from the Rosebud, so I won't even try to speak for the audiences. I'll just speak for me: to hear those kids sing out God's praise like they did put a fire in me. I don't own the adjectives to describe the joy those young people brought to their audiences—or any of them. I have not been as thrilled, to the core of my soul, in a long time, as I was been by those Rehoboth kids.
Some people say that in our post-doctrinal age, a time when people are maybe more “spiritual” than they’ve been, but sometimes not particularly “religious” (there’s a difference), a time when folks search for meaning but may not look too diligently in churches, the future of evangelism, of bringing people to the Lord, may well lie, simply, in offering beauty to a yearning world. What may bring people to belief in God almighty may not be reason or truth or even well-honed doctrine, but, in a gray world, the brilliance of a rainbow.
By way of music and stories and sheer fun, Rehoboth kids spread voluminous beauty wherever they went. A rainbow is what I saw in that church in Mission, SD, and in every school those kids sang. A rainbow, beauty from the Lord.
Hallelujah, that Lakota pastor said, over and over again.
Yeah, this old man said, trying to get his breath. Amen and amen.
James C. Schaap - May 9, 2008
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