Riverside/Dows Lake Week 5

This past week was pretty great. Everyone we are teaching came to the church building on Sunday and almost everyone made it into the sacrament meeting. 

I played violin in the park on Saturday and it was pretty good. I just played the quickly memorizable Christmas songs that Sister Philips would always have us play. I progressively got worse at playing as my fingers froze, but the purpose was to just get people curious, which it did. It was comparably better to other times we had been in the same park without the violin. 

And then, the very next day, Sunday, the talks appeared strangely directed at me or rather, it's just that they were about my hobbies. The first one, the speaker shared a story of a runner who was running a marathon in the Olympics and got injured part way through the race. The runner bandaged his injury and continued the race finishing hours after everyone else. It was dark when he entered the stadium and was cheered by the fans you had decided to stay much later for him. When asked by a news reporter why he kept running, he said "my country didn't send me all the way across the ocean to not finish". 

The next speaker shared a story about a violinist. This violinist started playing in a Washington DC subway station. The violinist was for the most part ignored. Parents turned away their kids from looking because they were busy and had to get places. Out of the some 200 ish people who went by only 7 stopped to hear the violinist. The violinist turned out to be Joshua Bell, one of the greatest violinist of all time, playing some of the best music, on one of the most expensive violins. Joshua Bells concerts are really expensive and here people were ignoring his free public concert. 

Now, I'm sure you can draw your own life lessons from these stories. It was weird that it was running, violin, and DC and I know Dad had met Joshua Bell once so I felt connected in some way to the sacrament meeting. 

When I contrast Joshua Bells experience with mine playing in the park. I got 2 people to stop, and I wasn't there for half as long as Joshua Bell and I'm not half as good as Joshua Bell so I would call it a miracle that anyone stopped to listen and talk to us. We passed out cards to lots of people going by, but 2 people is how many that actually stopped where they were going. 

Anyways, don't show Dad or Brother Day the picture of me playing because I was getting cold and tired and it made my form bad. 

Elder Pinkney