In my orchestra, I'm one of a small group of people who are Christians. It's weird to me because I've grown up in an entirely Christian environment, and so this is sort of my first experience of being that "one person."
The orchestra meets every Thursday night for rehearsals. I'd been doing a pretty awful job of witnessing for the past year, since that's when I joined. We have a short break in the middle of rehearsal (since it's about two and a half hours long), but I'd mostly talk to a small group of friends or just my one Christian friend who I know from other places. It was also a bit hard to go talk to the winds or brass, for some reason. It was as if there was an immovable barrier between the strings and all the other instruments.
Two weekends ago, a bunch of the orchestra kids went with some people from a college orchestra on a trip to Canada to play with an orchestra in Montreal at a concert. It was a lot of fun. That experience, since we went by bus, really brought us together and broke some boundaries. We spent around 10 hours in the bus together on the way there, at first in total silence. As the trip progressed, we started to get to know each other better and see other sides of each other.
I felt very odd at some parts of the trip. It surprised me that a big part of these high schoolers' common vocabulary was cuss words. They used them so freely, without thinking twice about it. They also told frequent inappropriate jokes, about sex or other things. A lot of these jokes were funny, and I was convicted when I found myself laughing and given weird looks when I didn't. I know this is what many kids at normal schools experience all the time, but it was new to me. I felt strange.
The weirdest part was when they were talking about something, and I joined in the conversation, not knowing what was going on. I asked them what this one word that they were using meant, and it was as if I had not known that the sky was blue. I asked, "What's a bong?" After that point, people kept coming up to me after, saying stuff like, "oh, your innocence... I can't believe you didn't know what a bong was... you don't need to know..." Even kids who were younger than me were treating me like I was 5.
My response to this could've been better, but I was trying to hold on to some sort of... secular-knowledge-dignity? After a while, I just wanted to pretend I knew everything about bongs or whatever else they were talking about. But later I made the point to say, so what if I didn't know what that was? I didn't need to, and certainly did not feel any want to know about specific drug-administering devices.
It was a fun experience though!
And it gave me more opportunities to witness. I haven't fully seized them yet. But, I'm getting there. I've had the opportunity to at least tell one of my new friends that I follow Christ.
That's all I got. Yay.
