Magnifying — or Magnified?

Last week I blogged about my job at church. If you want a refresher course on what I'm doing there or what our Mormon terminology means, you can read it here.


We are encouraged at church to "magnify our callings." In the dictionary it says that “to magnify” is “to increase the importance of: cause to be held in greater esteem or respect … to make greater.” One church leader said that we magnify a calling by:

"learning one’s duty and executing it fully, giving one’s best effort in assigned fields of labor, and by consecrating one’s time, talents, and means to the Lord’s work as called upon by our leaders and the whisperings of the Spirit."

I may not have come enthusiastically to my calling as ward music chairperson, but I have become enthusiastic about it, and I have tired to do my best to "mangify" this calling.

This week I've become aware that something a little odd is happening.

First we found out that our very talented choir accompanist would be unable to rehearse with us the two Sundays before our choir Christmas program. The choir director asked another woman in the ward if she could help out, but the woman decided the music looked too hard. It didn't seem like there was anyone else that we could ask on what was relatively short notice, so I told the choir director that I would give it a shot. I sat down and sight-read through all of the music without too much trouble. That was a surprise, as I am a moderately competent pianist at best.

I'm directing a woman's group to sing a lovely arrangement of "With Wondering Awe" this week at Enrichment night. We practiced for about an hour after church this Sunday. (These women are awesome, and the song will be too!) One of the women who is going to sing with us wasn't able to be there, and I needed to figure out something that would help her practice at home. Our accompanist recorded the accompaniment on my digital piano so that I could make a practice cd for this woman. I had planned to use a different "voice" on the piano to mix the vocal line with the accompaniment, but after I did this I was worried that with the short amount of time available this wouldn't be enough to help her learn the part. I decided that I needed someone to sing the part for the cd, and that for several reasons that someone would have to be me.

Let me clarify something about my musical ability here. I am a moderately musical person. I think my musical gifts are not the ability to perform, but are much more the ability to hear what is good in music, to teach music (like my wonderful primary kids), and to put different musical numbers together. I am, like I said, a moderate pianist and an even more moderate singer. While I had no problem at all singing in front of children week after week, it is very hard for me to sing in front of "regular" people. When we recorded the music for our summer slideshow this year I had a one line solo. I hated singing it, and I hated even more listening to it afterwards.

I knew when I decided to record myself singing this song today that I would hate hearing the finished product. I sang it without doing any warming up because I was in a hurry, and I made a lot of mistakes. Each time I made a mistake I would stop and re-start the recording at that point. That meant that I would have to clean up the vocal track before I could mix it with the accompaniment and burn it to a cd. In other words, I was going to have to listen to myself sing quite a bit. I was prepared for quite a bit of nausea.

To my surprise it never happened. I heard my voice singing and felt fine about it. Some parts were sharp and some parts were flat. I was singing the soprano line and I am no soprano. But other parts were fine, and some even sounded nice to me. I was stunned to find myself feeling this way, because I have never at any time felt even neutral when I've heard a recording of my voice, much less positive.

I had already been thinking for a couple of days about the unexpected piano playing ability, and then this happened. It made me realize — I've spent a lot of time thinking about mangifying my calling. But I don't think I ever thought that in doing this, I might be magnified by my calling.

Perhaps as I've given my best effort, the Lord is actually increasing what my best is...