Thoughts from a Musician's Heart

"GOD-MOMENTS" IN MY LIFE AS A MUSICIAN by Fausto Varela

I am a classical guitarist living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. I’m married to a wonderful wife, we have a beautiful daughter and a gorgeous toddler boy. Though I’ve never seen myself as an evangelist or a an apostle per se, ever since I became a committed Christian I’ve been fully aware of the fact that there is a great commission that requires me to share the gospel with others and to make disciples of all nations. Therefore, since then, I’ve considered taking advantage of the little opportunities I’ve encountered to do so. Up to now, I have witnessed 3 God-moments in which the Lord has touched the ones that somehow I serve. I would like to share with you these moments in chronological order:

The first time I saw this happen was while I was still in my undergraduate years. Very soon after my second attendance at the MasterWorks festival on 2005, I and some enthusiastic MWF fellow Honduran students decided to go ahead and start a weekly Bible study group at school with our music department classmates. We actually didn’t know what we were doing and didn’t know how to deal with the differences we would find among denominations along the way. But instead of falling in the trap of arguing opinions, we decided to focus on sharing God’s word for 1 hour in our devotionals.

It was definitely a very interesting experience, because it caused quite an impression on our classmates to realize that there was a close relationship between playing classical music and worshiping the Lord. This was a new concept for almost everyone. Up to that point, everybody, especially those involved at their local churches, in the choir or serving in worship music, related worship music only to the kind of music you play at a Sunday service. And now, there’s this guy (me) saying that according to Colossians 3:23, we must worship the Lord with whatever we did, which included classical music. It was like a spiritual level got unlocked in all of us involved in the Bible study that would show in our performances. Little by little one could see that the students started improving their performances just because a totally new purpose was tied to it. I was really glad to be part of this moment. 

The second moment was related to business. My wife and I started a music school 15 years ago. I read in a book written by Rabbi Daniel Lapin, that the word “Business man” and “Man of faith”, share the same root in Hebrew “Ohmein”. As our little business started, we discovered this was totally accurate. If there is a field in life in which faith is absolutely required, is in the business arena. We found ourselves trying to make it grow, to make our school capable of serving with excellence to a larger number of students. Through the course of the years, God has nourished our faith in an ongoing display of small and big actions. For instance, like when we had to move our operations online due to the pandemic just to keep the music school running. Again, we didn’t know what we were doing, and we didn’t know how we were going to do with online performances. But God showed his faithfulness all the way, and even though now we laugh at all those experiences, we are really thankful for His guidance during those tough times. 

The third experience of this kind is related to watching our students grow not only from a technical or academic standpoint, but in their character as they strive for excellence in their performance opportunities. Our music school has been a place in which we have made an effort to teach kids biblical principles that enable them to play their instruments for a higher purpose. Along the way we have seen students overcome their performance anxiety and all kinds of character weaknesses with the help of these principles, and it’s been wonderful to watch this happen.