Learning

A lot has happened in the last couple days. I teach piano and voice lessons for my job these days, and Thursday I taught a voice lesson in which I think I learned more than my student. I’ve been struggling with this kid since I started teaching him, because at 18 he of course knows everything and won’t listen to me, the one with 2 degrees in voice. So Thursday he sings a song for me and I have to tell him it’s not the best choice for him and he then just spends the whole lesson arguing with me.

What did I learn? When I brought songs to a certain teacher at USC, she used to tell me that my voice wasn’t big enough for such and such song or I wasn’t ready to sing this or that song, or some such excuse. I would get so mad at her and think she was just being a bully. The more I teach though, the more I see maybe she was just really bad at communicating the same kinds of things to me that I was trying to communicate to my student. The song he sang was for a tenor, he is more of a baritone, and I can’t really help him sing notes that his vocal cords just can’t reach. Not all songs fit every voice. It really was an eye opening experience for me. I am learning every day to forgive my old teacher more and more.

Second thing to happen was a flat tire. I normally think flat tires are bad things, especially when it’s raining and it happens right before teaching a piano lesson, and when the items to change said tire aren’t in the car so people have to be called to come help while I sit and wait at the piano student’s house for an hour or so. But by sitting there, I got to talking to the mom of this student, and ended up telling her all about my little brother’s psychotic wife, who is doing every thing she possible can to destroy him.

At the end of my story, Lisa (the mom) tells me her brother went through the exact same thing and that his wife had Borderline Personality Disorder. This makes the second person, disconnected to the whole affair, who has verified something Lief just happened to stumble on to in a bookstore- his wife is sick and has this Borderline illness. It is also a testimony to me that Lief is not alone but that God knows him and what he is going through and is helping him through it. There is no such thing as a coincidence!