You Were the Joy

Soon after we were married, Phil and I left our secure church family at Hopewell, and helped start a church in Downingtown, Pa. It was called "New Life." We were going to give it a year but ended up staying for five. Freeman was born while we were there and still has some of his friends he made in his babyhood years. All in all, we had a great church experience.

Phil was on the worship team. One night a week, he would go off to worship practice. I would put Freeman to bed and head for the living room to watch my favorite show, undisturbed. I have no idea what it was now. There was a keyboard in our back room. As I would head to the living room to turn on the TV, I began to hear a still small voice saying, "Come back here. I have something to give you." I would begin to mess around on the keyboard and some songs began to take form. I started to realize that the songs could be part of an Easter musical. God kept giving me the words and the music and by summer's end, there were five songs. When my sister-in-law was killed by a drunk driver in September, I shut down. I asked three others from church to finish writing songs for the three remaining scenes, and they did so. We had a wonderful experience performing this musical as a church.

Ten years later, in '95, I began to sense that God wanted me to finish what I started. The songs began to come again. The three earlier writers graciously gave permission for me to put the new songs in the place of their original ones. One of my favorite new songs was "Lazarus' Resurrection"-the song I was working on when Naomi died ten years earlier. At this point we were back at Hopewell. Many generous and talented men and women worked together to make a sound track and put together a production. We performed the musical for five years and because of its simplicity, were able to take it to other outreach churches and to a delinquent facility. We used a live white horse for the finale, when appropriate, and a donkey and puppies, pigs, sheep, etc. for the triumphant entry scene.

We kept it simple, using homemade costumes for the cast and wooden boxes for on stage scenes. There were twelve scenes and the musical lasted one hour.

The first year, we video-taped it. A good friend of mine played John the Beloved. A few years later, he died while he was hunting. We were able to show the video in his funeral display. His syblings took videos home with them and it meant so much to see him alive again. His one sister said that she could handle watching it for five minutes a day.

Easter is coming around again and I am hearing the words and the music to "You Were the Joy." I want to record the words in this blog book that I am writing for my children and share them with you if you'd like to read them.

The scenes are written and the story is told from the perspective of John the Beloved, my favorite human in the Bible. I will write it out one scene and one song at a time. Eventually, I hope to have the audios available with each song on the blog. "You Were the Joy" was copyrighted with the Library of Congress in 1996.