Anchor Soul

This year for Christmas, Faith Baptist Church put on a program called Anchor Soul. The last time something like this was done was before my time. From what I understand, it is generally done as a Halloween alternative. Some of my readers in Roanoke may be familiar with North Roanoke Baptist's annual Judgment House. I assume the programs are similar. This time, however, it was decided that Anchor Soul would be done as a Christmas special.

Anchor Soul is sort of a walkthrough play. A group begins with orientation in the foyer of the church, then they move from scene to scene. The performances went on for the last three nights and more than 1300 people came through the church. You may be asking how I was involved. Well, I was in the choir. And since the choir was involved, so was I.

In the foyer, the majority of the choir gave a Christmas concert for those waiting to begin their tours. Members of the choir were also used in the first two scenes: Heaven and the Nativity. Each night, we made three rotations. And because there were a total of six tenors, we were split up into three equal groups. On with the show...

Can you tell that this is the Heaven scene? I didn't get a shot of the whole thing, so let me describe the part that isn't in the picture. When I first walked into the room, I looked and saw what appeared to be a meteor crashing into a pod of whales. Turns out I was way off. Those whale tails up there are actually angel wings. And that meteor that cannot be seen here was representative of the throne of God. I guess that makes sense: the Solid Rock, the Cornerstone, the Consuming Fire. Yeah, I get it now. When we sang, we were told to focus on the "throne." And with the lighting and angle and pretty much the way your mind plays tricks on you, eventually the rock I was focused on started to look like a caricature of Sloth from The Goonies. That's gotta be really sacreligious.

This is Myra the angel.

I was playing a saint. No laughter, please.

Can you guess who this is? If you said Jesus, you're wrong. This is Simon. But he's playing Jesus, so I guess you're almost right. Sort of. Doesn't he look happy? He actually had it pretty rough. The choir got to rotate out after every eighth group. He had to keep standing there all night. They tell you Heaven will be a comfortable place, and I'm sure the real Heaven will be. Standing on wooden boxes covered in gossamer is not my idea of Heaven. Definitely not comfortable. But Jesus had to endure a lot more. See what I did there? That has double meaning. Yeah.

Scene two was the Nativity scene. I was going to include pictures from that scene, but I was afraid to do the flash photography. See, there were live animals. I didn't want to startle the goats and sheep. The goats went a little crazy on their own anyway. I had to contain my laughter more than a few times when one of them would butt another with its head.

You may have guessed, the Nativity was outside. The first two nights were downright cold. But tonight wasn't so bad. Plus our costumes (as townspeople) were a lot warmer than you'd think. Still, singing outside on a December night (three nights in a row) is probably not great for you. My throat's hurting a little. But that could be because of the crazy amount of singing that I've done this weekend.

I'll talk about the concert in the foyer at another time. For now, I'm tired. I'm going to bed. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.