Sunday Schedule: Singing at Sister Dalton's CES Fireside

This is a journal entry for Sunday, September 13. Here is a breakdown of my day trip to Provo:

• Sleep in until 10am
• Prepare a crockpot dinner
• Leave Logan, UT at 11am
• Arrive in Provo, UT at 1pm
• Enjoy lunch, pack my leftover stuff and a visit with Stef until 2:30pm
• Attend an hour of church in my old, singles ward
• Practice with the 888 voice choir
• Pick up my mail from my old apartment and visit friends for a 1/2 hour
• CES Fireside from 5:30pm to 7:30pm
• Dinner and Yahtzee with Stef, Scott and the Alyses until 9:30
• Drive to SLC at 10:30pm and pick up more stuff from my grandparents' house
• Return to Logan my midnight.
• Buy $45 worth of gas before returning to my apartment

The event I'd like to emphasis in this schedule is the Logan Institute Choir performance at the CES Fireside. We'd been practicing two pieces of music on Sunday evenings for two hours, for the last three weeks. The first piece was an "Amazing Grace" type of piece called "I Marvel at the Miracle." The second piece was a rousing arrangement of "Come, Come Ye Saints."

Going into the performance, I completely expected to favor our first piece, but I ended up being most impressed by "Come, Come Ye Saints." Our first piece was truly beautiful, but it lacked the power produced by our ending piece. In fact, it was the very last note of the last piece that was the most spectacular. We end the hymn in fff, then our conductor solicited even more. Imagine 888 voices singing at 100%, then, when you think no more volume can be produced, the power is boosted to 125%!


The most astonishing moment was when the conductor cut us off at the end of "Come, Come Ye Saints" The sound that was blowing the roof off of the top of the BYU Marriot Center suddenly ceased. The experience could be compared to witnessing the launch of a space shuttle, in reverse. The cool thing about shuttle launches is that you not only see the monumental billows of smoke and blaze of light, but you can also see the sound as it ripples across the water and blows across fields of grass and finally moves through you with the force of a great wind. The difference between the sound at the shuttle launch and that of the CES fireside was that the sound waves were disappearing instead of appearing. Also, in the Marriot Center, the exiting sound waves were accompanied by a rush of the Spirit, which confirmed the truthfulness of the message. All of a sudden, 10,000 people all said, "whoa."