Year 20: Perseverance Through Adversity

Perseverance is a lost art in the modern world, with everything seemingly created for expiration, values shifting with the political wind, and a more difficult to navigate world causing uneven ability to commit to people long term. But we all recognize those moments when someone has done more than they had to, stayed true to a promise through hard times, or navigated tricky waters of relationship to deliver a stated objective. I think of this when I see United States Postal Service workers delivering mail. When I was young they had an advertisement about how they would deliver mail through all weather and circumstances and today - many years later - they do seem to have a pretty tough mindset for delivery.

2020 was a year for perseverance.

When we got hit with the pandemic in March of 2020, we quickly realized our recruitment for the fall of 2020 was going to be unusual. We made the promise to stay open with "in person" classrooms, but that was not enough differentiation and difficult to accomplish in itself with the shifting parameters of the pandemic. Adversity had landed solidly on our doorstep and the multitude of expectations and range of responses from everyone and every financial decision were overwhelming for a small school. Ben Rawley, CFO, and Toni Melton, Director of Business, were heroes of the fight to keep things level and straight, and all of the Visible staff persevered through many trials during this phase of the world. Students who started school at an away musical college of our size in 2020 are paragons of perseverance.

Not much was normal in the fall of 2020 and spring of 2021.

We continued doing the business and ministry of a small creative Christian college throughout this year, including signing a deal with PCG in Nashville for coursework and adding rising star students from the mainstream music field to do study through our VisiblePRO program. It has been a long standing relationship of fruitfulness with Bernard and the PCG folks as we navigate ever changing landscapes of digital music, recruitment for students, and social media profiling. It seems to be headed in that same way for years to come - adversity of cultural waves as we purpose to persevere in the mission of Visible and ask God’s favor on the work and the wonder.

Through is the way.

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