Inspirational Person of the Week: Sarah Tullock

Sarah Tullock and I performing at First Baptist Church of Chattanooga in 2014

For years I had dreamed of attending Cambridge. I wanted to come as an undergraduate some 8 years ago—I was dying to get away from the “insignificance” of small-town Tennessee and “make it big.” But when I sent my transcripts to Cambridge they let me know in no uncertain terms that I would have zero chance of getting in. My guess is they don’t see too many GED diplomas. So I stayed in Chattanooga. I was disappointed but, in hindsight, I can see that my early rejection at Cambridge was probably providential. During the years that followed in Chattanooga I crossed paths with a lot of people who changed my life in profound ways.

One particularly notable example is a “kindred spirit” I met in 2011 when I was the pianist at Ooltewah United Methodist Church. During my time there the choir director resigned. Conveniently, a young lady at the church had recently moved to the area and was fresh out of grad school with a degree in music education; the church decided to hire her “on a trial basis.” Her name was Sarah Tullock. I unintentionally made her very first rehearsal with the choir quite challenging by completely forgetting to even show up. I was probably somewhere composing away. I felt badly about that and, a few days later, found myself in the choir room waiting on pins and needles for my first meeting with her, trying to formulate a suitable apology.

But I found that there was no cause for nervousness. Sarah carries with her an aura of peace and grace that instantly puts people at ease. She wasn’t on a “trial basis” for long; she won over everyone at the church almost immediately. Had she not been so young, no one would have ever assumed that she was fresh out of school—her wisdom was beyond her years and she already seemed like a seasoned choir director. In the following weeks I was amazed not only at Sarah’s extraordinary musical ability, but at the way she built a sense of camaraderie and community in that church through music. For Sarah, music is about building bridges between people, about making people feel loved and valued, like they are an integral part of something important.

Largely because of her influence, I began to reevaluate my own motivation for making music. I began to realize that I was more self-centered than I had thought—I wanted to play the piano in order to show people how good I was; I wanted people to perform my compositions so I would get recognition; I wanted to go to Cambridge for the prestige associated with it. Sarah unknowingly showed me a better way—that music should be about community; that our motivation for making music should be our love for people of all walks of life.

Sarah is one of the rare souls who seems to be extraordinarily good at everything she tries: teaching, singing, conducting, writing songs, playing piano, playing guitar, writing blogs… you name it. And yet she never shows off. There’s a down-to-earth quality about everything she does that encourages us to embrace our own humanity. I didn’t realize just how much I needed that perspective until I finally achieved my goal and came to Cambridge last fall. What I’ve discovered is that this place doesn’t make me feel nearly as significant as I used to think it would. On the contrary, it’s pretty darn easy to feel like a total failure here in this highly concentrated pool of some of the world’s most brilliant minds. Our own problems seem tremendously magnified in a high-pressure environment like this; we set unrealistic expectations for ourselves and then become discouraged when we don’t fulfill them.

In manifold ways Sarah is always trying to remind people like me that we’re just human, and that it’s okay to be human. We need to strive for great things, but we don’t need to beat ourselves up every time we make a mistake. When we do that, it generally indicates that we find our identity in the wrong place—it means we measure our sense of self worth by what we achieve, rather than realizing that our worth in God’s eyes is the same no matter what. One of Sarah’s songs says, “I won’t worship the work of my own hands.” That’s a message that’s deeply needed in Cambridge.



So when I was conducting a choral rehearsal a couple of weeks ago and miserably failed at what I was trying to accomplish and embarrassed myself in front of the whole choir, my reaction was different than it would have been a few years ago. I told myself: Yup, that was really bad, but you’ll live. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and do a better job next week. It’s an awful lot like something Sarah had written to me in an email shortly after I arrived in Cambridge:

“To go away and learn how to be alright in your own skin is a very natural thing in the human experience. It was brave of you to pursue your goal, brave of you to go there when you'd achieved it . . . and now it will be brave of you to stick with it and face whatever comes after.”

I can now say with confidence that, because of Sarah, I am both braver and more willing to forgive myself when I fail. Many, many others can undoubtedly say the same. That’s a tremendous gift, and the world would be a much better place if more of us sought with equal devotion to pass that gift on to those around us—to embrace humanity in all it’s diversity and imperfection. I, for one, am going to try. Thanks for the inspiration, Sarah!

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For more about Sarah and her music, click here to visit her website.

This is the second in a series of articles about people who have changed my life for the better. For some background information on what inspired me to write this series, click here.