I'm going to conducting school!!!!

Writing from Stuart, DeVri and Emily's place. Middle of the day and I read this blazing hot quotation from James Jordan's book "The Musician's Spirit":

Be patient, therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord.

James 5:7

My father was a farmer, and he raised that most rare and exotic crop peculiar to New England, cranberries, a tough and exotic piece of fruit not given to easy entreaty or easy growth....

One day when we were in the garden and I was a young fellow, I told my father that I thought I wanted to go into the ministry. He looked at me, and he said, without changing any one of his attitudes toward his hoeing, "I always hoped that my son would do honest work." I knew what he meant. The farmer lives in proximity to two ultimate truths, which are held in balance by the authority of his own experience. Ultimate truth number one is that the harvest is the result of incredible patience, and ultimate truth number two is that the harvest is the result of incredible work. Yes, he waits for and hopes for the autumn and the spring rains, and there is nothing that he can do to induce them. That is where patience comes in. That is where relying on forces beyond one's control comes in. In that season of waiting, however, he is hardly idle, for the farmer does all the work that can and must be done, knowing that time and God alone will bring fruition to what he expects and assists. I have never known an idle farmer who is a good farmer. It is constant work, but the work is full of expectation and fueled by the labor of experience. The farmer knows that what is expected is worth waiting for. The farmer also knows that what is worth waiting for is also worth working for, and that is why the farmer is commended by James in this most practical of epistles. James is not writing to farmers, he is writing to a fairly sophisticated audience of people like ourselves, in having lost the use of their hands in the fields, are now held hostage to the fantasies and disappointments of their minds.

p.1, SERMONS, Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living, Peter Gomes