Confessions of the female English tenor

I love singing in choirs: I love the depth of sound from simple four-part harmonies; I love the unity without uniformity; I love the discipline of holding your line whatever everyone else is singing.

We’ve just started up a choir in our church, so I have joined this group of thirty or so that rehearses two or three times a month. I am naturally an alto – I can’t easily reach all the high notes of a soprano and I love the challenge of a good harmony – but in this choir I sing tenor. There is only one other regular tenor who is 13 and a bit quiet. I’m not quiet.

As I sat in rehearsal the other day, I realised that me singing tenor in this choir is a bit of a metaphor for my life here in Athens. I’m not sure how best to explain this, so here are some bullet points to start us off:

• Singing tenor means I’m out of my comfort zone: I am singing to the very depth of my range which means I am often not singing as loudly or as freely as I could.
• I stand out: you don’t get many female tenors. I am a freak. It’s ok, I’m used to me, but in this way I am obviously odd in front of a lot of more ‘normal’ people.
• Sometimes I’m alone. In rehearsal the other night it was just me in the tenors. It’s fine: I’m up for the challenge! And I’m not REALLY alone it’s just perception: there are plenty of other people in the choir and I am not ‘the only one left’! (1 Kings 19:10 – sometimes I have an Elijah complex.)
• This singing tenor business is stretching me. I’m not playing to my natural strengths. It’s close, but it’s not the same. I was going to say that it’s like trying to draw with my left hand, but it’s not THAT hard! I guess it’s more like trying to draw with just my right thumb and little finger (try it…).
• I’m trying to do two things, and I’m doing both badly: I’m trying to sing the tenor line AND sing the Greek words correctly. Very occasionally I manage both (and it feels GREAT), but most of the time I manage one at the expense of the other.
• BUT, I’m willing and able and meeting a ‘need’, so I might as well (although I’d appreciate more capable fellow tenors, or even replacements…).

Maybe, like Jonathan, you don’t need the illustrative nature of this situation spelt out. You can stop reading now, if you like!

Living for Jesus means self-denial and life as an alien and stranger (or foreigner and exile as the new NIV has it) in the world. Sometimes one’s “strangeness” is deliberate: choosing to stand out and not go with the flow; holding a viewpoint that is considered out-dated or intolerant. Sometimes the strangeness is unconscious – it doesn’t require deliberateness or self-control – but still indicates one’s alien-nature:  a godly knee-jerk reaction to something that before Jesus would have not bothered you so much; a confession of both your weaknesses and sin that doesn’t require careful self-examination and that you no longer need to hide because of the liberating grace that God has shown us in Jesus.

There are many ways in which we are made to feel alienated. We are MADE to feel it – both by the alien culture in which we live AND by the God who has MADE us (and is making us) this way. It is good for us to feel alienated: we don’t belong in the world as it is; it should stimulate a desire for our true home – the new heaven and the new earth; it should drive us to call others to have that same hope of eternal life.

Somewhere in between this true and godly experience of all Christians and my experience as a tenor is my experience as a Christian from the UK living in Athens.

Language incapacities still restrict and inhibit my life in lots of ways. There is more that I could do about this in an active deliberate way. Just as practising and doing singing exercises would be good for developing my tenor skills, so practice and more work would improve my Greek. Sometimes there are not enough hours in the day, but usually there are. So please pray for my Greek and my deliberateness in development – especially in this season where my Greek has taken a back seat in preference to running the family and enabling Jonathan to get further in his Greek. But I’m out of my comfort zone most of the time in Greek: more comfortable listening, although it still depends a bit on the subject and the speaker. Thankfully I am comfortable listening to sermons and Bible talks, but my conversational Greek is still a bit ropey. I am not as free in Greek and in Greek situations as I long to be. I am not myself yet, most of the time, in Greek. I want to try and explain this a bit better in another blog, but we’ll see…

I stand out because, although some people think I could pass for a Greek, I don’t quite fit in. I don’t really WANT to fit in in some ways – I’m not very conformist. But Greek society is quite conforming, generally.  So there are ways in which I’m deliberately making myself conform. Some of these are probably ok or even good: my clothes style has changed so that I don’t look quite so much like a foreigner; and, for the sake of not upsetting some of the older folk in church, I wear skirts mostly on Sundays (this one is up for debate, anyone?). Not so good is that I am less comfortable going out without make-up because I’m aware that most women don’t, and therefore do conform and put make-up on to go out. There is a constant (but not always consciously constant) strain between not conforming to the pattern of the (Greek) world and being all things to all people that maybe I wouldn’t have thought so much about if I were living in my own culture.

Feeling isolated and lonely are regular flickers in my conscience. They don’t stay long and don’t really affect me, but I’m aware that the feelings exist. I mostly believe that they are mostly a product of my own expectations and sense of entitlement. (See Andy Shudall’s blog here for an interesting take on that.) The extent to which I feel any of these things is relative. I once had more friends and more tangible local support than I do now. Now I don’t. Head up. God is still God, I still have the same assurance that Jesus is my only hope, nothing can separate me from the love of God and if God does provide for all my needs then he is providing for my needs for fellowship. I need to learn to be satisfied in Him whatever and practise contentment. And anyway, I live with five other people and there are friends in the city, just not round the corner. AND I should make more of an effort to make friends with people in my neighbourhood.

I am going to write a blog some time about living cross-culturally being like living like an amputee. So here is a very brief summary: Living cross-culturally means that you can’t rely on your natural abilities in the same way; you live similarly but not the same as before; you have to make adaptations in order to settle in to your new life; you need to have lower expectations of yourself; you need to be willing to grow in ways that might highlight some of your limitations; you need to accept that you will have limitations; you need to be prepared to grow and stretch in spite of those limitations; you are not the same as you were in your own culture and you never will be. More on that some other time.

Multi-tasking in any culture is tricky. Trying to be a faithful child of God, a good wife, a perfect mother, a thoughtful daughter / sister / niece / cousin / friend, who is spinning all the associated plates  plus a few others, doesn’t always (ever?) go to plan. When things go well, praise the Lord, when they don’t, praise the Lord. I rejoice especially whenever I manage to give time and attention to something in a proactive not reactive way: when I PLAN to spend specific quality time with one of the children for their good; when I manage to plan and cook something that isn’t a last-minute, thrown together, born in stress creation; when all the clean laundry is away (fat chance!) and all the children only have clothes in their wardrobe that fit both in terms of size and weather (and we see flying pigs whilst enjoying a month of Sundays…). If I spent any amount of time thinking in more detail about all the things that need doing, all the things that I should be doing and all the things I’d like to be doing and trying to plan my life around them, I would probably lie down somewhere quiet and not want to get up again. So, I try to rejoice in the good times and the not so good, persevere in the stretching nature of life and look forward to the eternal rest to come!

I am willing and able, so I might as well live here and seek to serve the church here and be involved in Christ’s work of building his church where I am. I would LOVE to have more co-workers, especially Greek ones who would find aspects of life and work here easier than me. If you know any Greeks that might consider working with us, do let us know! The co-workers don’t have to be Greek though, but they do have to be prepared to "sing tenor" as it were - even if they are a well-seasoned and very gifted soprano or bass or sing so badly that they don't even want to listen to themselves. The problem is that we don't like admitting our weaknesses, let alone learning to be content to live in them for extended periods and press on through, relishing in God's strength and provision and rejoicing. Language learning is tough. It was then, it still is. Cross-cultural living is ego-bruising to say the least. I would love to find and train replacements for the things in which I can be replaced (there is no vacancy for wife of Jonathan…), but it’s more likely that we will be training co-workers and not replacements at this stage.

I know that all of the above contains a lot of ‘I’s. Many of the ‘I’s could be ‘we’s: I know that many of the feelings related to the above issues are shared with Jonathan and other 'cross-culturally living' friends; I know that many of the above are common to all who live for Jesus. I’m also aware that this is a very me-centric blog. My prayer, however, is that, as you’ve read my confessions and my struggles, you are pointed to Jesus who is the author (captain/pioneer) and perfecter of our faith.