One of the realities of working as a church musician is that you wind up being forced to celebrate liturgical holidays before everyone else. It obviously makes sense. You have to rehearse the music ahead of time. Before that, you have to spend some time selecting music. Late last summer, I was going through the calendar and selecting all of the music that my children's choir would sing this year, meaning I had to spend some time sitting there and listening to Christmas carols in August (much to my roommate's chagrin) while I selected songs for them to sing on Christmas Eve. The Chancel Choir started rehearsing its Advent oratorio this past year in October, and we've been working on our Easter Anthem since before Lent started. It's not a bad thing or a good thing necessarily. It's just part of the job.
Anyways, the church I sing at does two services on Easter Sunday, but the choirs combine (there are two separate choirs at each service), so both services are the same. However, since the combined choirs have to work together in conjunction with the brass/organ/handbells, every year we all get together the Wednesday before Easter to rehearse everything, but there's definitely a cognitive dissonance when you're singing "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" with full forces during Holy Week. And yet singing that hymn this evening gave me a tremendous amount of joy. Even though it's still Lent, I was able to witness a brief moment of Easter bursting through at that time, and it was wonderful.
Today, I saw God in singing a hymn too early.
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