It has been a week since the final full day of Hope Singers 2022. A day that was full of goodness, but also a degreee of sadness.
Work projects were done throughout the community, there were tour debriefings, suitcases were packed, final chords of favorite songs dissapated out of time and space, and a group of people who had barely known each other several weeks before delighted in their last several hours together in Poland.
The beautiful gifts of the last few weeks are too numerous to count:
Night after night, we gave of ourselves through song, and the Spirit moved.
NIght after night, tears flowed as we sang Rozpal ogień, Panie, as we and the audience called out to God to make life and light in the world.
Night after night, people’s eyes lit up when they heard us sing our first words of Polish in Niechaj Cie Panie
Night after night, people mouthed along with us as we sang Wszystko Tobie. Twice, the congregation requested it as an encore.
Night after night, regardless of what we as individual singers could (or couldn’t) bring to a concert, there was tremendous beauty, deep goodness, and a sense of connection that can only be explained by Christ’s work in our lives.
Looking back at the last few weeks, I’m deeply grateful that God brought this particular group of imperfect individuals together, and made us into one choir. We were in Poland this summer for a purpose. What that purpose was, we will never fully know. The songs we sang, our voices, our, names, our faces; will all fade into memory. Given time, even those memories will morph into something much less defined, a shadow of the reality. Eventually, there won’t even be memories, and Hope Singers 2022 will be forgotten…
No matter. Our desire isn’t that we be remembered, but that our time of sharing beautiful music in Poland could ignite a few small sparks for the Kingdom of God. That years and years from now, there would still be fires brightly burning that originated from Hope Singers 2022. This is our prayer.
Thank you to each one of you for following along with our tour, and for your prayers and support.
Soli Deo Gloria
–Darren Nisly