CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., (ABP) — “We are learning life lessons on patience and diligence and the power of perseverance. A whole new universe of music and possibility has been opened up before us.”
Elizabeth Haysom's learning experience is coming is an unusual source — a prison handbell choir.
Being a member of the handbell group, called Metanoia, is a “marvelous privilege and joy,” Haysom wrote in an article for the Religious Herald. She said being a member of the group has changed her life and the lives of the other women who play.
Haysom is an inmate in the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Fluvanna, Va. She said the weekly handbell practices, led by a local minister, are a blessing she and her bell-ringing partners look forward to. “I can't think of anything else for which I have such an exuberant expectation, month after month,” Haysom wrote.
Bob Wheeler, minister of music at Broadus Memorial Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Va., started the handbell choir in January 2003. He said the idea came from one of the church choir's trips to the prison several years earlier. On that particular occasion, Wheeler brought the handbell choir as well. He said the women were “enthralled” with the bells.
He began the bell-ringing class through the prison chaplain's office. But first he had to be trained as a volunteer prison instructor. The whole process took more than three years. “Frankly, I didn't do anything, but my wife kept pushing me,” he said.
Wheeler began the program by having women at the prison audition for the bell choir. “When we started, we had some who had no idea what a quarter note was,” he said. “They've caught on quickly, and this has now become really central to their lives.”
Leading a bell choir in prison isn't easy. For the first five months, Wheeler carried equipment back and forth between the church and the prison every week. The choir was becoming an obvious success, he recalled, but the task of carrying equipment and having it searched by the guards had became tedious.
That's when members of Broadus Memorial Baptist Church got involved. They donated money to purchse a three-octave handbell set for the prison choir, as well as foam pads, mallets and gloves. One church member even sewed table covers for the group.
Haysom said she and fellow bellringers were moved by the church's sacrifice. “If we understand nothing else in life, we surely understood that spending a lot of money on us was a serious commitment of their love for us, their faith in us,” she wrote.
The bell choir — “metanoia” is the Greek word for “change” — has become a huge part of the women's lives, Wheeler said. They play for Sunday evening worship at the prison, and next year they will be playing two full concerts.
Although Haysom doesn't like to talk about the circumstances that landed her in prison, she is exuberant about the changes taking place in her life.
“I know that it is a great privilege to play the bells, to be a part of Metanoia,” Haysom wrote. “But it is an even greater honor to be in the service of my Lord and Savior, my King, with such a delightful gift.”
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