I always knew that the lessons I learned whilst doing the music minor in college would serve me well, but as life often does, a bounty is still bubbling from those mines.

The music minor at Hendrix was honestly one of the proudest things I had accomplished when I walked there in May of 2003. For reasons of academic difficulty, life circumstances, and the simple ways in which God has wired me, the amount of work it took for me to bring that thing in for a landing demanded an extraordinary exertion. I doubt many here are all that privy (much less interested!) in what those days looked like, but formal music studies is a fascinating place where abstract, academic chalkboard stuff mixes it up with learning to actively hear, see, and then reproduce in the language owned by every human on the planet. I love every bit of it still.

I can acknowledge now, so far removed from the fact, that I wasn't all that good at any of those things.

One of the primary reasons I stuck with that incredibly difficult academic pursuit was just because I loved it. With a worn smile, as I sit here my mind is straining to remember when I was last that alive to something.

I had an even deeper reason, though, for that singlemindedness. Simply put, I wanted to bank, for me and me alone, a Herculean task that I could remember for the rest of my life that I didn't quit.

I certainly remember the hopeless nights hunched over the only piano on campus that wasn't locked to me, and I'll never forget the hopelessness of knowing that my listening sections on tests were guaranteed to go over like a lead zeppelin. And it was always painfully obvious to me that I didn't "have it" the way the viola stars of the day or non-trained guitar studs around me so effortlessly evidenced.

But I stuck with it.

If I recall, of the five(?) theory courses I took at Hendrix, I made C's in three(?) of them. Those classes consumed far more of my time and thought than anything else I did during those years. Yet music, which was ultimately NOT my major course of study, still became the most important thing I did at Hendrix.*

It was all incredibly difficult work, exhausting in all kinds of ways.

But I made myself stick with it.

I knew as I was winding up that minor, and even in my afterglow-for-one after I'd finished it, that for the rest of my life I would be able to say, 'Hey, music at Hendrix didn't beat me, and neither can this.' And since then I've said that aloud to myself, I've stood my ground on it, I've revisited those days in journals from the time, I've done all that plenty more than once. In my battle(s) with depression, with various academic things, even some prolonged relationship struggles, in all of those things I've taken the lessons learned about myself alongside those modulations and secondary dominants and wrapped new flesh upon forgotten victories.

Which brings me to today, and my seminary pursuits (specifically, Hebrew).
I was updating my roommate recently on This Week's Reasons Why My Life Sucks, and he said to me regarding finishing my seminary degree, that I was "just hardheaded enough to do it, too."

As I've been thinking about these things on and off in recent weeks, I've become more and more convinced that God requires a lot more hard-headedness than most of us would like to admit. I'm sure not equating those music pursuits, or even my seminary degree, to anything much more noble than some crude concoction of vainglory and theories about what I'd enjoy doing with my life that would benefit God's work the most too. I do think however that you'll find in the Scriptures a lot of people who had to dig in and marshal sheer guttural willpower to get things done, and we are expected to offer ourselves to God in some of the very same ways.

I guess you'd say then that being hardheaded has become my major, or why I am the way I am.

Blame music I guess.

© Dixon J. Parnell, 2007.

*Do dig this little bit of irony: I got a D in Latin III the first time I took it at Hendrix. In the meantime, I went and did the music sequence. Retook Latin III the spring after my last music class and got an A in it. I attribute all that to having stuck with the discipline of studying music. And oh yeah, teaching Latin is how I pay the bills nowadays.