Year 12: You Feel It in Your Heart

Feeling it in your heart means sometimes you are very happy and sometimes you are very sad. Running any enterprise, especially a ministry, and especially a creative and musical business and ministry, is very difficult. Expectations and failures and trials and successes are taken in as you go through it together, which is why our number one value at Visible Music College is GLOBAL, or TOGETHER. Having a global, kingdom of God based model and outlook, means we must live through everything TOGETHER and feel it in our heart.

By 2011, Visible had moved into our New Downtown Home and completed phase 1 of Into the City campaign. Most of us were new to the core of Downtown and we were in new space, new housing, new offices, new recording spaces, and we were raising support as we went along. This leaves room for a lot of fun times but also some disappointment. One of the highlights of these years is when we came together to shoot “the lipdub video” in December 2011. We had an intern from Holland with us and her project was to work with Andy Dean and record a lip dub video for the whole school in a fun and crazy, goofy way. We had a great group of students in 2011-2012 and so many went on to do great things.

I watched it recently and it is amazing how innocent 2011 looks to post-pandemic and more tense eyes of current days. It is not available online because of intellectual rights to the song, but we had a blast making the lipdub video. People can ultimately work together from their heart on things that matter and be ok with each other, even when we are different. Shortly after shooting the video, Visible suffered our greatest ever tragedy and faced extreme grief as a community. Misunderstanding exacerbated some pieces of this story, but the community rose to worship God and be there for one another. Together.

It is amazing how the highs and lows follow one another in life and creativity.

Feel it in your heart (that was the lip dub song name). Feel it and share it and attempt to love one another while you go through the high and the low and the boring and surprising. If you look hard you will see that we are in all of this together and maybe you could even feel compassion for the one you don't understand. Usually, more understanding brings ability to go on well. Feeling it.