Disciple Now 2009 has come and gone and what a weekend it was. Steph and I hosted the Jr. And Sr. High School girls and I ran the technical end of the worship services. I have not been this tired doing something I enjoyed this much in a long time…
However, it didn’t seem like it was going to start out that way at all…
Friday I had a plan. I had taken the day off from work so that I could get up, help Steph finish straightening up the house, do the slides for both nights on my Mac laptop, get up to church early and do lighting design and get ready to worship. Yea that was the plan and the world saw to throw that out the window almost immediately.
Sure I got up early enough to put the plan in motion and was actually helping to straighten the house, AS PLANNED, when the day crashed. I got a call from the office that the office email was not working. I went downstairs and made several attempts to restore service but without any success. I called our IT support and had them on the phone working on this issue for hours. To make a long story short, our domain hosting account was set up on a domain name we no longer used or even kept up with and it had expired. As of this email, it is still down until IT support can restore email in the morning. The good news is we found the problem. The bad news is that it took my plans and laughed at them.
Around lunch, I started to get out my laptop to do the slides with. Only one problem, no mouse or power supply. 2 things you really have to have to work on a laptop. After a feeble search, I gave up and went with desktop plan. So for the next hour, I worked on the slides for tonight to run on the desktop in the loft at church. Around 2 pm, after a lot of frustration, I grabbed the thumb drive with the slides on it and headed to LMBC.
Once at LMBC, it didnt get any better. I uploaded the slides and began to do lighting design. Only one problem. The lights were not communicating with the board. I reset the board, breakers and lights with once again, no success. I worked with them getting more and more frustrated all the time. Finally I realized that I was the one trying to fix everything and I couldn’t do that.
I walked away…
I went into one of the Sunday school rooms off to the side. “God I can’t fix this. Nothing is going right. Help me!”
Wrong prayer. Instead of show me the way, use me, take this from me, I said basically help me look good and solve this problem. I didnt realize that you could even pray a wrong prayer and maybe it wasn’t the wrong prayer, just the wrong WAY to pray.
I gave up and did the speaker slides for the evening just to take my mind off of it, or so I thought. I went over and over in my head what could be wrong while doing the speaker notes. Greg came up at 3:30 and said “Come on, go to the zone, walk away” which I did. The leaders for the night met for a short worship and communion. Danny and Derrick led worship for the leaders and it was EXACTLY what I needed. I needed to take my focus off of the details that I WAS TRYING TO FIX and let God run the show. We had about a 30 minute worship service and communion and I walked out of there giving all the technical problems to God.
Funny thing about God, it’s His church, His building and guess what else….it was His lights that weren’t working.
We got back to the loft and Greg and I began checking the lights. We found one light with WAAAAAY too many cords going to it. Once we removed some of the length of cords, BAM! The lights came ALIVE! It was like it was too far away from the power source. Like I was that night from God. I had lost my power source, just like I had lost it for my laptop and I had let too many technical details make me lose sight of the purpose of the weekend. Once I realized this, I CAME ALIVE just like those lights.
The band Unlucky Tree led worship. These guys really rocked the place like it hasn’t been in a while. It was loud and a lot of bass with cranked up guitars and very loud drumbeats. The kids, and I, loved it! They ripped the roof off the place and then toned it down and led us right into the very presence of God Himself.
The theme for the weekend was about being “Infested” and how we need to be “Infectious” with the Love of God. Steve brought a great message on Friday night but Friday night couldn’t come close to Saturday night.
By Saturday afternoon, I had found my power supply for the laptop and had the scripts ready to roll using my Mac laptop for better video quality (Friday night we had one video completely lock up, man do I love my Macs!) All of the technical problems had gone away once I gave it to God. The band stepped up the worship service and really knocked it out of the park. They played a version of Amazing Grace like it was on steroids mixed with I Am Free that really started us off with a bang. Two of their original songs really brought us into worship once again.
Steve’s message for the night was on 3 types of people:
Dead
Defeated
Dangerous
It really hit close to home with me. I struggle daily with how much I want to be used by God and how much I want to be in youth ministry but I am stuck in my dead end go now where not even close to legitimate job that I am in. I fall head over heels in the defeated category hanging on to my problems and sin. He then talked about being dangerous. He used the example of Lazerous and how the Jews wanted to kill him after Jesus had brought him back from the dead. Because of him many Jews were following Jesus. That is what Christ wants us all to be. Someone who is focused on Him and lives for him daily. Someone who will be faced with attacks all the time because they do so much for the kingdom that the world wants to take them out. As he put it, people don’t shoot missles at cruise ships, they shoot them at battleships. I don’t want to be a cruise ship, I want to be a battleship. I want to be DANGEROUS….
Today, was the final day of DNow with Unlucky Tree leading the 11 AM service in worship and Greg teaching about Infested.
Today we got to see the results of the weekend when one of the youth, came forward and gave her life to Christ.
And that made THE ENTIRE WEEKEND all worth it…
Dear God,
Thank you for this great weekend that we had just being with our youth and worshiping you God. I love it when I get so caught up in worship that I forget what I am doing in the booth. I love it that I can be in the back of the room, singing right along with the band, tears flowing down, raising one hand in praise to You, and using the other to advance the slides so others can worship also. You gave me this opportunity and I am so blessed in all that You have done for me. As long as You give me breath, I will serve You. Just please don’t let us do the pepper or coke games again…..the end result was pretty gross….
Keith
KWHITE75 