Sweet Connections
Ideas come to me in the mornings before I get up or a little later when I am putting on my makeup and fixing my hair. As I was standing at my mirror yesterday, I thought back to the concert at the Grand Ole Opry House last week.
I realized that the music was special because it connected to my own past. Though the quality of the entertainment was top-notch, the choices of songs made me enjoy it even more. Were I to attend an event like that in Japan or Africa, I would have been blessed and amazed, but I wouldn’t have had the sweet connections that I had in Nashville.
When I saw that the theme for the “Little House on the Prairie” television show was on the program, I couldn’t bring back the tune in my memory, but when the orchestra began to play it, my heart rejoiced. To hear and see a huge orchestra play that song from deep in my memory was thrilling.
Two teen girls whistling a duet of the theme song of “The Andy Griffith Show” while the orchestra accompanied them was fun because I watched the show as a girl, I watch it now with Mother, and I saw and heard the original whistler whistle it at my elementary school years ago.
When a soloist sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” I was back in my high school American history class. Our teacher Alvin Rose was fresh out of Peabody College when he taught me my junior year. He brought in many innovations, such as lecture notes on an overhead projector and discussions in small groups, that are old news now. One day he told us to analyze the meaning of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
I believe that learning is more fun and more easily embedded into our children’s minds when that learning includes connections. What a blessing it is that you are exposing your children to great books, to beautiful music, to wonderful art, and to God’s amazing Creation. Along the way they are making connections. Just think of the days in the future when they will look back and smile like I did last Thursday night.
These are Google definitions for connect:
- bring together or into contact so that a real or notional link is established
- join together so as to provide access and communication
- associate or relate in some respect
Sounds like a lesson plan to me!
Yesterday I found a shiny penny in the bottom of my washing machine.
It made me think of Jesus and the poor widow who put her last two copper coins into the treasury at the Temple.
And He saw a poor widow putting in two small copper coins.
And He said, “Truly I say to you,
this poor widow put in more than all of them;
for they all out of their surplus put into the offering;
but she out of her poverty put in all that she had to live on.”
Luke 21:1-4
When the Master Teacher “looked up and saw,” He taught; He made connections. I would have loved being with one of the disciples when sometime years later he saw a copper coin at just the right moment to remember and make sweet connections.
It has been fun to read about FASA from your perspective! Sounds like it was a wonderful evening. Bryan and Lucy were there with their grandfather (Robert and I were on a vacation alone together!) and Bryan described it as, “Fantastical.” I’m so glad you and Ray were able to go!
Bryan is right. It was “fantastical!” Ray and I were glad we got to see Bryan, Lucy, and Robert’s dad and to see their reactions first hand. They were both as “gobsmacked” as Ray and I were. Their faces were beaming. It was wonderful to see their exuberance. So many teens are “too cool” to exude about a symphony. I saw more evidence of what you and Robert are doing well in the lives in your children.