Worship Textfessional – October 28, 2007
This was morning was, in a word, adventurous. Here’s how things ended up going -
Sunday, October 28 – “Follow Me”
Lord Most High – E – Don Harris & Gary Sadler
Announcements/Offering
Prayer
No One Like You Lord – E – Robin Mark
You’re Worthy Of My Praise – E – David Ruis
Here I Am To Worship – E – Tim Hughes
Everlasting God – A – Brenton Brown
Message – “Faith, Forgiveness, Repentance”
My Jesus I Love Thee – D->E – Featherton & Gordon
Okay. So why adventurous? After having practiced on Saturday morning, run through songs and soundchecked on Sunday morning, play our walk-in song and do my little welcome, I hit the very first chord of the very first song and this happens -
It was incredible. Guitar players, picture this! I’m playing in the key of E and I break my D string. WHAT?? Not only that but the bridge pin holding my G string jumps out a little bit and the G string actually jumps across the neck and is now sitting in the slot where the B string goes. Yes – crazy. In all my years of playing guitar I have never had that happen and I still have no idea what I did to make it happen.
Needless to say we had to start thinking quick. Thankfully we had another guitar player on the team – she was able to carry the first song and instead of doing two songs in our opening set, we just got through the first one and then moved in to the announcements section. That gave me some time to grab another guitar (I wasn’t wanting to chance it again by just re-stringing the guitar I was using!) and get everything set up.
So of course our mixes were totally off for the next set and not only did we have to deal with that but all of a sudden there was a ridiculous amount of distortion – NOT on purpose – on my vocal. Crazy.
Anyways – major props to our A/V team!! They had what I like to call a “learning experience” today and we can look back on it now and it will make for a good story :) The other really neat thing that happened is that the congregation had the sense that something was going on (although most had no idea the extent of what was happening) but really responded by kind of rallying around us as a team and singing louder. Our middle section of worship was probably one of the time that people have been most engaged in worship in my time here. Several people came to me after the service and said that. Pretty cool what happens when things don’t go as planned – although I much prefer the planned route, to be honest!
Looking at the songs, you may not get the connect between the themes and the core of the message – faith, forgiveness, repentance – but our big push today was on trust. So establishing that God’s faithfulness is like no other, that He is trustworthy and then moving through a time of proclaiming our trust in who God is and closing with “Everlasting God” where we say together that we will wait on God but know that He is everlasting. We closed the service with me on piano leading the congregation in “My Jesus I Love Thee” – nice way to end and give people a chance to reflect.
Okay – so there’s a long confessional. I’m hoping to move these to video shortly but more on that later.
Isn’t it awesome when crazy stuff like that happens, and the Spirit uses it to break down the walls of the heart and get people to give more of themselves than they would have otherwise? Sometimes I think we should pray that our worship time NOT go smoothly or as planned so that our congregations never get comfortable with what’s going on.
Strings never break on a synthesizer. :)