And We Can Do Better

This morning, as we were rehearsing for today’s broadcast of “Music and the Spoken Word,” Brother Wilberg said, “I listened to the recording we made of this piece on Thursday night”—he was speaking about a particular song that is very difficult to sing well—“and I can honestly say that this is best we’ve ever done. It’s really, really good.” He paused, smiled, and said, “And we can do better.”

It was nice to hear that he was pleased with our performance. When he says that something we’ve done is “really, really good,” that’s not an idle complement. Mack Wilberg doesn’t give idle complements, at least not to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

So he thought we did very well, but he also thought we could do even better. So this morning, we worked hard to make the song even better.

And after the broadcast, he gave us two thumbs up.

So isn’t “really, really good” good enough?

Of course it is. But if that’s the case, why push to do even better?

After my mission, I only attended one reunion of the Korea-Seoul Mission. When my wife and I arrived, the first thing that struck me was that many of the men had long hair and beards. But long hair and beards were only part of the problem. Of course, that wasn’t how I remembered most of them, but it was something else that bothered me. The missionary fire and zeal was gone. Now I realize that none of us were serving fulltime missions anymore, but so many of them seemed lost or were simply drifting through life.

One of my old mission presidents was the featured speaker. In his talk, he said, “If your mission was the best two years of your life, you’ve failed.” He told us that we needed to be anxiously engaged in serving the Lord and that we needed to be constantly seeking to better ourselves through service, education, marriage, study, and prayer. He told us that if we were not progressing, we were in a state of temporary damnation.

He told us that we don’t need to be stagnant, that the best is not behind us, that we must move forward. In short, he called us to repentance. And it was glorious.

What a redeeming concept! No matter how poorly I have done in the past… or how well, I can always strive to be better.

In the Choir, we are often told that we are only as good as our last broadcast. In other words, we need to constantly strive to be better. It doesn’t matter so much how good we were in the past. We need to push harder to be even better next time.

So today, we sang a really difficult song. And we sang it well. We probably sang it better than we’ve ever sung it before.

And next time, we’ll try to sing it even better.