A few of the kids already knew this song and loved it already so they were excited. I introduced it by showing them a video done by Mormon Soprano. (She states that she has permission to use the music and the pictures are all church approved for general use.) The children loved watching it and many were humming along by the end. Then I quickly taught them just the chorus, and had them sing it along with the video a second time. It was a lovely, quiet feeling, even with the large group of junior primary we have, and the senior primary enjoyed it just as much.
For the actual performance, I'm having a small group of girls sing the first verse, and a small group of boys do the second verse. All will sing the choruses and the part that builds up to the climax. This part is especially difficult because they are words that don't have a lot of concrete meaning. So I came up with four images that I thought would help them remember the key words (hardest thing, greatest pain, biggest battle) and then I stair-stepped them on the board.
Since the song starts out talking about Jesus climbing the hill, we talked about how hard that was, and then I had a child come up and move the picture of Jesus up to each paper and "climb the hill" as we sang a line of the song. I also talked about how I wanted them to start quieter, and then add more intensity as we went, so at the climax of the song they would be singing very strong, like going up stairs. This lead into a reminder about the difference between singing loud and singing with strength. Always a good thing to review!
After church, I had one Sunbeam come up to me and say, "Do you know what? Jesus did a hard thing!" Love when they are getting it. One of my older boys who doesn't always participate a lot came up to me and said that this was his favorite song and he had it on his ipod and already had it memorized and was really excited that we were going to sing it. Music can work miracles!
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