I’m CSPC Associate Director of Worship Wyley Wilkin, and this is how I’m living deeply.

We came here in January 2021 on a leap of faith- some people might even look at our choice as foolish. We moved from California, where we’d lived our whole lives, without having any friends or family here. Why Knoxville, Tennessee? I wanted to pursue a master’s degree in choral conducting, so I’d done a shadow day with a professor at UT and just fell in love with the program. Plus we wanted to live somewhere that aligned a little better with our values. When we moved, I hadn’t even been accepted into the grad program yet, and I didn’t have a job. My wife worked part-time remotely, but we couldn’t live off of that. Our families probably thought we were crazy. (To be honest. I don’t know if I remember telling them that I hadn’t been accepted into the program; we might’ve kept that a secret!) It totally paid off, so I’m just going to believe that it was God calling us to come here! (I hope you can imagine me chuckling as I say that.) I ended up getting into the program – and not just getting in, but getting a grad teaching assistantship, which paid for all of the school! That was huge, but the game-changer for me was when a professor connected me with Landon Paul. Landon had gone through the same program, same degree. With Landon, it worked out perfect because our church tastes and ideologies are really similar. He was trying to help me find a job at first. But before I found one, the position at CSPC opened. It’s funny- I had worked at a Presbyterian church before and it was fine, but I left that position thinking, ‘If I do Presbyterian again, I think the EPC would be a really good fit for me.’ I’d never been to an EPC church, but knowing the doctrines and the vibe of the denomination, that’s what I was thinking. Of course I’d also thought, ‘But that’ll probably never happen.’ And then the CSPC role pops up, and it just worked out perfect. I love being under Landon’s leadership. So it was just one thing after another- you could tell it was being worked out for us. The Bible says, ‘He goes ahead of you,’ and it really felt like that in a lot of these steps.

That didn’t mean there weren’t difficulties. Our two kids had only known California, so that was an adjustment. And I also arrived at CSPC at a time when the choir was adjusting to something new. It was clear a big part of my role would be to help the choir move forward as a key part of CSPC’s larger, intergenerational vision. But this grieving of the change was tough, and it still can be. So for me, trying to navigate those changes –to not take things personally when people are disappointed or sad, to not be reactionary- was really hard. But it’s these hard things God really uses to grow us, and I think I’m seeing that. I feel like I’m getting a lot better at being able to walk with people and help them embrace the grief they’re going through. That grief is real, and you don’t want to ignore that. They ARE losing something. So once I realized that we needed to walk through that –to embrace the grief, but also embrace what God was doing in our church- that was a really big shift for us as a choir. We were able to say, ‘It’s okay to feel this way, but we can’t let that override or cloud the good that’s going on. God is taking these beautiful things from the ashes of this and turning it into something great.’ So that has been a big turning point for us.

The main thing God’s been impressing on me through all this –the move, the season of change for the choir- is the importance of having His peace in your life. As I tried to lead a group of people going through a difficult time, I realized I can’t do this without really embracing God’s peace. It’s not something you pray harder and harder for- it’s more the idea of just embracing it, a constant reminding yourself, ‘It’s fine, He’s in charge of this.’ And if life doesn’t go the way I think it should go, that’s not the end of the story. If that’s the case until the day I die, that’s still not the end of the story- the story just continues into eternity. And grasping that has really helped me walk in peace, because it puts things in perspective. You can know that no matter how difficult things get in life –if you’re in some storm the rest of your physical life, even if it never lets up- that’s just a little blip in the entire story you have ahead of you. And after a certain point, it’s only good things. Once life ends here, it’s the good things you can look forward to, and that has really helped me have peace. Of course there are times when I don’t feel that or act in accord with it. It’s easy to think about how difficult it was after moving here and to forget how God has brought us to this point where everything has mostly turned out really well for our family. Difficult moments come and overshadow that. But I feel like that’s exactly what God’s peace helps us walk through. You’re able to navigate that fog knowing what’s on the other side is going to be fine, even if the other side is eternity. Here on Earth, you’re going to be in those foggy patches, and it’s His peace that helps you walk through them. That’s been huge for me because I, and even the choir, can get cyclical with things sometimes. One month we’re like, ‘I can really see what God’s doing. This is going to be great!’ Then, months later, it’s ‘Why has he abandoned us?!’ (I’m exaggerating with humor, but you get the point.) So we have to keep re-centering, keep coming back to embrace God’s peace. It’s never not there, but we just kind of turn our head away from it.

Day-to-day, my goal is to embrace His peace before I start reacting to some challenge and have it come out in a negative way. So often in my life, after the fact, I’ve realized, ‘Wow, I handled that poorly.’ And it’s because I wasn’t walking in peace. I was letting the situation make me anxious- absorbing too much, letting it irk me. I haven’t arrived, but I can see God leading me away from that sort of response more and more. It also helps that I have so much to be thankful for. The CSPC worship staff is great. We all just really share a similar heart and vision: to want to see people worship! That’s the primary motivator. Every one of us appreciates that there are people at CSPC who connect to Christ through a specific song or arrangement, or through the choir or the worship band or whatever. We’re trying to get beyond the music and into a truly free, healthy worship scenario. The congregation does that so well- they sing so loud and so strong. You can tell they’re engaged, interacting, worshipping. It’s incredible. And I’ve really been blessed by seeing the direction the choir has been going. This year’s Christmas concert was a really poignant night and a special high point for me, and it had a lot to do with the fact that I could tell the choir loved it! They were getting to the point where they were like, ‘I am loving everything about this.’ They loved that there were so many people there. It was starting to feel to them like, ‘This is what I remember, but it’s the new version of us, and it’s being received well by our community and our church.’ They could feel very strongly that night they had something to give that blesses the church, and that’s what a lot of them they really want. It was honestly the first concert that we’ve done at CSPC -and probably in the last five or six years of my life- where afterward, I was like, ‘I’m happy with that. There wasn’t anything I’m going to obsess over.’ I was able to just be done and feel like, ‘That was great’- a feeling of relief, gratitude, satisfaction, and, yes, peace.