By Wil Triggs
Going away to college was a big change for me. One of the biggest changes related to my instrumental music and the ensemble I would be a part of. It could be expressed as a change from the marching band uniform to the tuxedo.

Some of my fellow musicians went off to big universities. A key musician who was ahead of me went to the JewCLA. That’s what he called it. When he told me his school, I asked him to repeat it. JewCLA. That’s what I thought he said. As anti-Semitic as it sounded to my Caucasian ears, that was not what was going on. The son of a rabbi, he wore the yarmulke to school on special holidays not recognized on the school calendar and on one or two days of the year stayed home altogether. I think one of them was the Day of Atonement. He said all his Jewish friends went off to that school on their way to becoming lawyers or doctors. There were so many in Westwood that the Jews dubbed the school their school . . . JewCLA.

Students who aspired to professional musicianship chose USC. Back then these two schools played in the marching bands at big football games at the Colosseum, once a year against each other. If their sports teams did well, they would travel to a bowl game and appear in parades—roses, oranges, cotton. Back then, it was usually roses. A couple of my buddies studied engineering there as well, so it wasn’t just music back then. Lots of great departments.

For me, things were different. I knew that I wanted to go to a Christian college. I was called to Christian ministry. God put his hands on me, and I longed to go where we could openly prepare for Christian work.

There was no football team at my school of choice. We had a soccer team that was good because of all the missionary kids and international students who came. The band didn’t play at their games. There was no marching band. No orchestra, either. I had to audition to get into the concert band.

My college wasn’t much bigger than my high school, and the band was smaller. I didn’t care. We had a Bible department.

My school taught Bible and theology—I took as much of that as my major--and we talked about Jesus and sharing your faith and integrating what I believed about God with everything else we were studying. This was all new for a public-school kid like me. I was required to get a practical Christian ministry assignment. I signed up to teach fourth-grade Sunday school.

Although there was no marching band, there was an entire building devoted to music. I went into the building and found the audition signup sheet taped to the band director’s office door. So, I put my name on this door sign-up. As I walked down the hall, I noticed a lot of practice rooms. Little rooms built for no other purpose than to practice. Now that was pretty great. So, I took to the practice rooms and started practicing my audition piece, the third movement of a contemporary concerto from a Russian composer. I loved it, but it was long.

I played a very good audition. It was just me and the band director. I played the best cadenza I had ever done in front of another person, surprising both me and him.

Yes, I passed the audition and they wanted me. He asked me, urged me even, to consider majoring in music. I loved music and I wanted to keep playing, but I had a different focus.

When the results were posted, I saw that they had placed me too high up. I was serious about music, but I wasn’t majoring in music. I wanted to play, and I loved it, but this was not why I came to this college.

As we started to meet, this band had a little government. The president, an upperclassman, made announcements and prayed at the beginning of class. He casually mentioned the cost of the tuxedo for new boys in the band. We could stay after to get measurements taken or come back that night.

I came back. As they took my measurements, they told me how much it cost again. It was a basic assumption—everyone has money for that. I would have to pay to get the tuxedo. I was horrified at the thought that they were going to ask me to pay right there on the spot.

This was a concert band, not a marching band. It was a private, not a public school. If there had been a fee for the public-school marching band uniform, it was almost nothing. This tuxedo, well, I had to pay for the whole thing. And I had no money to spare. How was I going to pay for that?

I did have a bank account. I could walk to the bank from my dorm, so I had gone to there and signed up for a checking account and got a checkbook, but I wondered why I bothered. I had no job, and though there would be some grant money coming my way, it hadn’t come yet and there wasn’t enough in the account to cover the tux.

“How am I going to pay for that?” I asked God and wondered to myself at the same time. This was a refrain to the beginning of my freshman year at school.

I went to the band director’s office to try to talk about moving me down the rank, third or fourth or fifth chair would be fine. Still urging me to consider the music major, he talked me about adding private lessons as an additional class. The teacher was a studio musician…I listened; it would mean a drive to Burbank. The class would be included in tuition. Practically free lessons (part of my tuition) with a professional, I liked the sound of that.

I was nodding, sounded interesting but really, I was just thinking about how I was going to pay for the tuxedo. Or should I just give up. Every week, I would ride with one of the other instrumentalists, about an hour each way and then two hours there, one for each of us. Four hours a week for a one-unit class.

People warned me not to take too many classes that first year. I could get a job, but people had advised not to if possible. The band director is talking about the added class. I agreed to the additional class. All the while I’m back on the tuxedo thing. “How am I going to pay for that?” I asked God again.

I asked out loud at the college group Bible study at my church. I asked myself again. Should I even continue with music?

The answer came one day when I opened my campus mailbox. There was an anonymous gift of the exact amount of money I needed. I don’t remember telling anyone how much money I needed for that tux. I asked and the director said he didn't know anything about it. To this day, I still don’t know who it came from.

Except that I knew that money had come from God. I certainly had told God. It was the exact amount. And even if I hadn’t told God, he already knew. It wasn’t really the money that I needed, but that mysterious gift opened my eyes to the truth that something bigger than tuxes and band was going on, and is going on still.

I stayed with band all my years at that school but I didn't major in music.

The notes of the concerto for me were to become words, not sounds. The valves became the keyboard not of a piano but a typewriter and then the computer. The English department opened my mind to writers like Dostoevsky, Dante, Lewis, Eliot, Donne, Herbert, Shakespeare. In the communications department I dove into the elements of connecting and expressing truth through words, spoken, written, performed, published. This was the future of my musical world, the actual horn morphed over time into music that wasn’t music at all. Thoughts and ideas, faith and truth, laughter through tears. Letters combine to make words that make sentences, paragraphs, chapters and on they go.

Because of our great Creator, it is a wonder to walk as his creations now, today, and again tomorrow and then, forever. God blesses us with the presence and wonder of each other, the church. There is more to come in the suffering and the glory. Heaven-bound vessels of clay, salvation far beyond and contained in the mundane day-to-day things of life.

All of life, looking back, seems, well, not an audition exactly, but a life buoyed by words and the Word, filled with rides shared, gifts given, wash and washing, song and singing at the same time. Failures and trials and triumphs, most of these known only but fully by God. By God alone. Things that we don’t yet know, maybe never for us to fully know, and yet the Bible tells us what we need to know. Jesus loves even me.

God alone is not alone.We are part of one another. Church is our home, but there will be another.

Some have gone ahead of us to Jesus. I think now of Priscilla Weese and Nancy Hawley and Belinda Duvel at home with others, the mystery of salvation. The music of it always playing like a surprising well-played audition. The wonder that this is happening in us by Father, Son and Spirit.

The prophets who told us this was coming asked a lot of questions about this gift of life God was preparing. The Messiah’s Spirit let them in on some of it—that the Messiah would experience suffering, followed by glory. They clamored to know who and when. All they were told was that they were serving you, you who by orders from heaven have now heard for yourselves—through the Holy Spirit—the Message of those prophecies fulfilled. Do you realize how fortunate you are? Angels would have given anything to be in on this!1 Peter 1:10-12 (The Message)

Your name is on the door. You’re seated higher than you deserve. The tuxedo is paid for. Now the music can begin. Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow in worship.