“Our epic fail” – a missionary moment
Our short-term mission team of 12 people in Liberia was gifted with artistic abilities in music, drama and choreography. We were invited to a church one day and one of us prepared us to minister the song “I will never be the same again.” Our voices harmonized so beautifully and we sang so well, it became one of my highlights for the trip.
Two years later I was part of a smaller mission team of six people to The Gambia. Because of my experience with the previous team, I impressed upon my teammates to make us sing “I will never be the same again” at a church we’d been invited to.
The team didn’t think it was a very good idea because none of us was a regular singer or chorister, although I had sang in a children’s choir as a child and another member of the team had sang briefly with our ministry’s music team.
I encouraged the team that anything was possible on the mission field and God was able to help us do it if we’d give it our best. So, we rehearsed for our performance.
Sometimes we surprised ourselves by sounding better than our doubts and at other times we sounded so bad, we considered giving up the idea, but I was not about to let my teammates miss out on the potentially fulfilling experience of singing “I will never be the same again” on the mission field just because of a few off-sounding pitches.
The D-Day came and we were the first to be in church, even helping out with arranging and cleaning the seats.
The moment we had been preparing for finally came and we found ourselves on stage ready to sing “I will never be the same again.”
We were not far into the song when things started going south on the music scale. I tried to maintain some decorum in the Lord’s house by soldiering through our adventurous performance while holding in my laughter.
But as our singing got dramatically worse and worse, I could contain it no longer and neither could the rest of us. We alternated between singing and suppressed laughter. I felt that was not very respectful but the situation was by then truly hopeless. Just when I thought I’d regained my composure, one of us would suddenly sound so ridiculously horrible I was back in stitches with laughter.
I couldn’t tell if the look on the faces of our audience was one of polite pity for the pathetic singers from Ghana or a bewilderment too much for words– they remained expressionless. What had started out as a disappointment at the very few numbers at church that day (less than 10) became a relief as our embarrassment did not become one before a massive crowd.
Whatever that small church thought of us afterwards, they did not say. Even their pastor who had invited us remained as cordial as before.
As we headed back home in the cool dry air of Jolakunda that night, I had the biggest side-splitting laughter of my entire life as we recounted to one another each person’s unique experience of our epic fail at singing “I will never be the same again.”
Although our performance in The Gambia was not as harmoniously rewarding as it had been in Liberia, it certainly gave me the laugh of my life.
I guess we were rewarded after all for daring to sing “I will never be the same again” on the mission field in the face of reasonable doubt!
-Representative photo by Freepik
