Independence Day: 4 July 2014

               I spent Independence Day with my beautiful family (minus Jill). It was a super lazy day. The boys set up the new swing set and eventually we went out to the lake for a little bit. We ended the night with music and fireworks at Pioneer Park.

 Hunter and Hailey kneeboarding at the lake

We went out to Mantua lake the day after the 4th to play on the wave runners.

            This 4^th of July was more meaningful to me than any other. Not because I did anything more special or out of the ordinary to celebrate it, but because of what I understood and felt in my heart. 

            I believe that I owe it to the millennial choir. It was kind of a miracle that I got the opportunity to rehearse and sing with this choir. With 250 members, it was bigger than any choir I’ve sung in before (besides maybe the combined choir we made with two others high schools at Carnegie Hall). It’s really quite the experience to feel the power of a choir of 250.

            Brett Stewart composed and arranged some truly powerful music that our choir and orchestra prepared from February through May and performed in Abravanel Hall at the end of May. It was an experience I will not soon forget. Glenn Beck was narrating and relayed many facts and stories about America and the songs we often sing but don’t fully understand. The truly neat thing about our repertoire was the emphasis on God as the true founder of this country. Truly it was God that prepared the way and led those who made this land free.

These are some of our directors.

Cherilyn Worthen

Brett Stewart

Cory Mendenhall (Cory spent the most time with us in rehearsal)

Kailene Wallentine and Tim Leishman are in the choir--two old friends from high school.

These are a few of the songs we did:

Profile of a flag

Star, emblem of heaven’s distant vast

The goal aspired by man from immemorial epochs past

Stripe, symbol of searing rays of light

Emanating from the sun’s sustaining sovereign life

Blue, vigilance, perseverance, justice, truth

Resolve of a people who democracy pursue

White, purity, innocence, comfort, light

The peace of a nation fearing God defending right

Red, hardiness, valor, prowess, head

Courage of the fallen and their blood devoutly shed

Star, stripe, blue, white, red

The New Colossus

(A sonnet written in 1883 by Emma Lazarus. In 1903 the poem was engraved on a 

bronze plaque and mounted inside the lower level of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.)

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”