It's a week before the year 2011 ends, and this morning I was thinking about my goals for 2012. Every year I make goals about losing weight, exercising more, and reading the scriptures daily. This year I am adding something new: "Sing and Play a Hymn a Day". (I like that little rhyme!) There are 341 hymns in the current hymn book of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At the bottom of each hymn are two scriptural references that connect with the hymn in some way. My goal for 2012 is to sing and play a new hymn each day and read the scriptural references for that particular hymn. That means, by the 341st day of 2012, I will have sung and played each hymn in the hymnbook! I figure at that point, I will go back to the "Christmas" section and play those hymns again for the last 25 days. (2012 is a leap year, so we get 366 days.)
I have been our church's organist for the past three years, and the primary pianist (children's organization at church) for a year longer. I find that funny because I took my first piano lesson in 1998--when I was 40 years old! My lessons spanned the course of a year, but when I went back to my "Piano Lessons Notebook" and counted the actual number of lessons I took, I found I only had 36 lessons!
This "Hymn Challenge" will be an adventure for me. I hope to write about each hymn on a daily basis. I stole the idea for the title of my blog from the book and movie called "Eat, Pray, Love" and got the idea for blogging about my experiences from the book and movie "Julie and Julia". I hope I am still blogging a month from now! I told myself that when I am somewhere without a piano to play, I will at least sing the hymn of the day. I can always pretend that I have a keyboard in front of me and position my fingers as if I am playing the hymn. That will have to work for those times when I am on vacation and don't have access to a piano.
Wish me luck!
