Emma & TaRanda

This past Saturday evening (October 14), I took my little girl to see the Greenes at Riverside Baptist Church in Graham, North Carolina. Let me kind of set things up…

I had told Emma we had a couple of surprises for her on Saturday. We had a fun family day at a local farm (which was surprise #1) where Emma rode on a train, enjoyed a nice hayride, saw some great animals and came home with a big, orange pumpkin right from the pumpkin patch. Emma had a blast. We came home and prepared ourselves for surprise #2. Let me stop here and inject something here…for as long as Emma can remember, I have always made promises to her, and have always bent over backwards to keep them. I haven’t broken one yet, as I am smart enough to try to keep it safe as to what exactly I promise. But if I promise it, I make it happen. Well, Emma knows that, and she’ll tell you that daddy always keeps his promises. So with that in mind, the hay was murder on my wife’s allergies and she ended up with a bad headache, so she opted to stay home and true to my word, I took Emma to hear the Greenes.

Now anyone who knows me knows that I am a BIG fan of the Greenes, and an even bigger fan of TaRanda. My wife and I fell in love with her spirit and her voice when we first met her not long after she joined the Greenes. Anyway, Emma is probably a bigger fan than I am. She has TaRanda’s “A Thing Called Love” CD memorized word for word and note for note. Needless to say, Emma was so excited to go see the Greenes.

The Greenes did their normal marvelous job and TaRanda had already sung “Sky Full of Angels” earlier in the evening. Tony was wrapping up the invitation and TaRanda mouthed to me asking if Emma would come up and sing with her. I asked Emma and being the shy little girl that she is, shook her head no. I tried asking again, but she wouldn’t give in…even after TaRanda poked her lip out and gave Emma those sad puppy dog eyes. As Tony was wrapping things up and closing out the evening, TaRanda said someone had requested her sing “Sky Full of Angels” again. So as she belts out the song, she comes out into the audience and approaches me and Emma and has me sing a couple words into the microphone, and then she let Emma have it as Emma sang, “Nobody but Jesus gonna take my soul.” It was priceless! I was about as proud of a daddy as anyone could be. It was just precious to me. It was all Emma could talk about on the half hour trip back home. And she wouldn’t let me leave without getting a DVD so she could watch them sing anytime she wanted to.

I said all that to simply say, “thank you” to TaRanda for making a little 5 year old’s day and hopefully in some way, instilling a great love for this music that her daddy has. And beyond that, instilling the messages found in these great songs. I pray that as she tucks these messages in her spirit, that they come alive in her as she grows older and she realizes that she really does have a sky full of angels watching over her as well as a Heavenly Father who loves her more than she’ll ever comprehend.