I can’t just quietly send out a link for this project and hope that you watch it. For starters doing things quietly isn’t really in my nature and there is a bit of a story that I hope will help this project feel even more meaningful to you.
It seems appropriate that our final act as a Vanguard youth was to put on “A Comedy of Errors,” because the last few weeks of working on The Living Christ project has felt a bit like a comedy of errors (though perhaps I wasn’t always laughing).
Our original date for recording the project if you’ll recall was back in March and cold weather pushed this project out two or three times and this was after having a difficult time pinning down a date in the first place! Truthfully I was a bit begrudging about all the date changes but once we got to the temple on April 28th I was grateful for the later start date. It was cloudy, comfortable and the trees were in bloom. I felt like heaven was shining down on us for working past all the kinks and for making it happen despite our 9 busy schedules.
To prepare for this project — creating a video, something I’ve never done before — I purchased a microphone for my camera, hoping to cut out some of the background noise and magnify your voices as much as possible. Spending $100+ on personal mics was out of the question for this project so I was hopeful that we could pull off something that was good enough with my $20 mic from Amazon that got great reviews :D
Marilee and I tested the mic in our yard and since it was a simple plug-in function it worked seamlessly with my camera I wasn’t too worried. I noticed that the sound quality still was just ok (lots of background noise) but I was hopeful that if people projected we could make it work. I figured we could try to minimize some background noise when we edited, though now I see that was hugely optimistic of me, but at the time that felt like a realistic wish ;)
The day before our recording date Marilee (my 12-year-old partner in this project and our video editor) visited the temple. We assigned the spots for each family’s speaking parts and attempted to take some footage of the flowers and the temple that we could use at the beginning and end of the video (every single one of those videos would later be scrapped and was re-done at a later date. I had NO idea how bad I was at holding the camera still during moving footage!).
You might be wondering at this point how I could feel so optimistic about this project when I had never done one before, my microphone was going to provide only pretty good sound versus great sound and with some concern over large file sizes and an old iPad for editing. Believe it or not the reason I felt so optimistic about this project is I had a HUGE amount of faith regarding it. I don’t say this to brag, I’m just telling you, I put this project in the Lord’s hands. I knew He had inspired it. I just knew this video was the way we could be a part of bringing light like we have studied this school year so I knew we would see a miracle. This may sound like blind faith since it doesn’t sound like I was bringing much to the table with my lack of skills and mediocre equipment but I have had the privilege of seeing God work mighty miracles in my life when I put complete trust in Him. I’ve received revelation for solutions, I’ve seen my talents magnified and my meager efforts turn to something so much greater when I have given it all over to the Lord. These experiences with the Spirit are so near and dear to my heart and my testimony that I cannot deny them and I felt sure of guidance and miracles once again.
So with confidence that morning I asked you all to join with me in prayer outside the temple. I prayed in gratitude for the miracle I knew we would witness — I thanked Him for magnifying our efforts and for allowing us to see His hand in our work that day. I was so touched to be able to pray with you over this project and I felt confident that you guys would be able to watch that video and feel the spirit, feel proud of your efforts in memorizing these words that testify of Christ and would want to share the video with others.
We started recording and it took twice the amount of time and I had a 10 minute delay due to a dead battery but everyone was a good sport, everyone was flexible and it went well. It was a crazy busy day at Vanguard but it felt good, we finally had accomplished what we set out to do and now it was just up to me and Marilee to pull it together into a finished project.
You guys know how the story goes from here. I uploaded all 30+ video clips to my computer and heard nothing but white noise on every.single.video. I was in shock and I was devastated. In my shock I wracked my brain trying to figure out how the microphone could have possibly failed. After a lot of troubleshooting, digging around and thinking through the day I finally noticed the itty bitty teeny weeny tag on the mic cord that said “iPad” — yep. I had plugged the mic in using its iPad cord instead of its camera cord. The cord fit perfectly and with my limited experience making video it never even crossed my mind to see if I was using the wrong cord — truthfully I didn’t even remember there were two cords to begin with!
While I was so heartbroken to have to tell your moms that it was all ruined and that I had failed everyone (that’s what it felt like), the hardest part for me was that I felt betrayed by Heavenly Father. I poured out my heart in prayer and, though I’m not proud of it, words like “how could you allow this to happen?” were definitely spoken. I cried over this project and I could not fathom why it could have all fallen through, how it could have gone SO wrong when I had put so much faith and trust and prayer into this project. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t receive a nudge from the spirit to check my cord. Why I didn’t feel strongly that I should check my audio. Why, why, why. I felt like in my prayer with you at the temple was not answered and I was incredibly sad for myself and for all of you.
As I continued to pray over this and seek for understanding and seek healing for my heart over what felt like my broken trust, the spirit reminded me of others — other people who I greatly admire who were doing good and yet bad things still happened to them. This wasn’t a general thought, rather it was specific people and experiences that came to my mind and reminded me that they still trusted in the Lord even when it didn’t go the way they had planned. I was humbled in these remembrances and my heart was softened. I had no idea why the cord failure was allowed to happen, but I was reminded and clung to the truth that God is Good NO MATTER WHAT. He is good in the middle of the mess and He is good in the miracle. The painful trials I have experienced to this point in my life have been difficult but largely out of my control — nature and illness and death and the poor choices of others — and this was the first time I could recall laying it all at the altar of the Lord, giving my effort and faith and coming away with what felt like failure.
Though in some ways my faith felt fragile that night, like it had been tested, I clung to the truth I know — God is in this mess and He will help me through it. I didn’t know if that would mean a re-do of the entire project and I wasn’t even to a place where I wanted to think that through yet. It didn’t sound very fun :) That entire weekend I felt tutored by the Spirit. I was able to look as if from the outside looking in and accept that silly, dorky, unfortunate things like a cord failure are just part of life. We will experience disappointments but will we still praise God in them? I was determined to praise God no matter what.
One quote that came back to me in the moment and gave me courage to pray for guidance and ideas of how to move forward with this project, to overcome this latest “brick wall” is this quote from “The Last Lecture,” by Randy Pausch:
“Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough.”
Well, I wanted to trust God could help me fix this mess and I wanted it badly and I wanted this project to continue even if that meant another long day of video-ing, another attempt at rescheduling and hoping the weather would cooperate and on and on.
Through pondering and prayer I came up with three solutions — One, redo the entire project, Two, record your voices saying your part but play the sound behind a picture slideshow using the pictures we took of each of you at the temple, or Three, try recording voice overs, matching up your lips and just re-doing the recording part. I felt at peace with these solutions and at peace with all that had happened. After doing a voice over trial with my own kids I was actually really amazed at how much better the sound quality was. SO MUCH better. It wasn’t too hard to match up their voices and though it wasn’t always perfectly matched up I was happy because the sound quality was THAT much better. When the moms agreed to go forward with the voice over recordings I started to feel even more hopeful as I visited each of your homes and was able to interact with you and feel so grateful for your effort. I was able to see Marilee shine in her editing skills and feel extra grateful for her knowledge and expertise. This doesn’t mean the recordings were a piece of cake — we had technical errors, we learned a few things the hard way and some of you had to record quite a few times to get it right — but I could see God working a miracle and I was so glad we didn’t give up.
In truth I started to see that perhaps what He led me too was even better in some ways than what I had set out to create in the first place. So was the cord mistake on purpose? Was it all part of His divine plan to be led to a solution with better audio quality? I’m not willing to make that claim because I just don't know and in truth that isn’t even as important as what IS true: God is working things for good even when you can’t see it. God is watching out for you even if you feel like that can’t be true. God will help you make miracles from messes and He will never leave you comfortless. It was His goodness that helped me shift my perspective from feeling hurt and lost back to a place of trust, it was His goodness that brought us together to support one another when things didn't go as planned and it was His goodness that led me to solutions.
Hours more of recordings, driving, editing and effort went into this project — at this point it was pretty much all Marilee with me giving my opinions from the side :D What we have created is not perfect but I am perfectly happy to have been a part of this project.
Thanks for allowing you to share a little more of my side of the story, I felt like it was meant to be shared. My faith was strengthened in the fire and though you probably aren’t a dramatic, crying, crazy lady like me, I hope you too received greater faith and saw blessings from your work on this project.
I love you all,
Sister Jessee
View the final Video HERE (and please share with family and friends!)
And just in case you were wondering when I talked about sound quality, here are some examples just for fun:
The first video is Marilee (who does have a quiet voice) without the mic:
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