Beat up and Burned

Those are the first words that come to mind post Surge (men’s advance).  We spent two days in Maupin, Oregon white water rafting, wrestling, swimming, bonding, studying the Word, and developing relationships.  It was awesome!  We did all leave a little more read, and a little more black and blue due to all of the tackling that took place in the boat.  Instead of attacking other boats we decided to fight each other and in doing so spent half the time out of the boat.  It was a great time and I think the church will notice the affect by the way the men are going to take hold of their relationships with their wives, with God and the other men in the church.

So Stoked

Ok so tomorrow a bunch of us from CKC are heading down to Maupin to go rafting and advance our Christian Man-hood.  I am so stoked to hang with my friends and have a blast.  Sure I will miss my Lisa and Melody, but we will survive and hopefully I will come back with some encouragement to be an even better husband, dad, man, leader, Christ-follower.

Please pray that we have safe travel, and a great time and that God does a work in all of us while we are there, and that we will be open to His movement.

OK ok ok

So those of you who read my blog regularly know that I have been having issues with our sound system not working the way I would like it.  So yesterday Dave and I spent another 5 hours trouble shooting the issue and I think we might have remedied it, at least for now.  We broke down every variable and tested each one.  We found that one send in the snake is bad, one 1/4″ cable is bad, and one adapter is bad.  We move the monitor line to a different send, fixed the adapter and now it works virtually quietly…which is nice compared to the loud hum that was there Sunday.  We also discovered that one main speaker wasn’t working as well.  Yup that is right we were running on Sunday with 1 speaker and no monitors…pretty awesome (hopefully you caught my sarcasm).  So with a little time and some work we got it fixed and now have stereo mains.  It’s almost like the whole thing is working again…crazy.

Hopefully this fixes the problem for a while.

The Dark Knight pt. 2

OK, so Friday night some of us got together and finally went and saw The Dark Knight and the verdict was…

I hate sound systems!

There comes a time in each worship leaders life where he finally gets fed up with the stuff he has to work with.  I am not talking the band, or the people, but the system.  We have for a long time used jimmy-rigged and second and third hand equipment and I am officially tired of it.  For the second week in a row our monitors have stopped working either in service or just prior to service starting.  This creates a huge dis-advantage to anyone wanting to were what the rest of band is doing or hearing voices of the singers.  I am not sure how to fix this problem but I am sure that it is a problem and a huge annoyance. 

The biggest frustration to me about it is that I allowed it to be a distraction from my personal worship of God during our 9:30 service.  I allowed it to keep me from diving head first into worship and the pleasure of meeting God face to face and worshipping Him for all He is.  I spent a lot of time praying between the services that God would let me be free, that He would let me get past this minor distraction and annoyance and worship Him, and lead freely.  Thankfully God answered my prayer and I had a great time of playing music and singing for His glory, and I believe He allowed me to lead better as well.

I know that this sound system thing is not fixed but I will be working hard trying to figure it out and praying that God will allow me to worship Him with freedom Sunday and to lead with humility and submission to Him.

Samurai Hedge Trimming

Ok, so if a title was ever going to get you to read a blog this one might be it.  Unfortunately there is no seriousness to this post.  At LifeGroup we were sitting around and talking about something (after the study was over) and my samurai swords came into the discussion and someone brought up that my swords are not sharp and they are really dull.  So I got them out and let people feel the blades and thought, “hey I have an idea” so Dave and I went outside and hacked away at our Japanese maple in the front yard and trimmed it up nicely.  It worked really well and was a lot of fun. So I guess that showed all you doubters of my swords…hahaha.

good ole thursday

Thursdays are often the busiest day of the week for me, besides Sundays.  It is the day I try and get done everything I either put off or just couldn’t get to.  I have to have all of the songs prepared and ready for practice, as well as the slides for the sermons and songs, and pretty much anything else for Sunday.  It can be a stress-filled day, but honestly, I really do love Thursdays.  I love getting together with the band and getting ourselves ready musically to be able to make ourselves as invisible as possible Sunday.  It can be a fine tension between leading and performing but I love that the band wants to lead and not just make awesome music.  If we can play skillfully and honor God by our worship, and ride that line of enhancing and not overpowering this tool of music for worship we totally succeed.  Pray for us as we prepare to lead in worship Sunday, and pray that we can worship God with the talents and gifts He has entrusted to us.

 

also, pray I can get done all I need to get done…haha.

Cigarette Butts

Cigarette butts!  Well I just spent that last 2 hours hanging out with some people from Texas picking up cigarette butts in downtown Gresham.  The crazy thing…I had fun.  We got talk to some people about what we were doing and a lot of people thanked us.  It was cool.

Would we know?

I read an interesting, well at least challenging and though provoking, blog by a worship leader I have a lot of respect for (Tim Hughes, we actually do a lot of song he has written) and he posed an idea, would churches today know it if the Holy Spirit wasn’t present during the service?  Wow that is heavy.  Would the service just go on as normal, good music, cool graphics, motivational preaching?  Would anybody really notice? 

Do you personally feel and notice the presence of the Holy Spirit when you worship God?  Do you anticipate meeting with Him when you pray, sing and read the Bible?  A verse that gets tossed around in discussions like this is Matthew 18:22, “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.”  That verse sets a precedent that we are gathering in “His name”, do we ever come to church just to hang with our friends and chat? 

I believe that the church ceases to meet its purpose if it becomes a social club and we stop expecting to engage the living God.  If we cease to desire to meet with Him in a corporate fashion we are in my opinion wasting all of our time.

Hopefully this Sunday as you prepare to come and worship the living and true God as a big group you come with anticipation of meeting God face to face and come in Jesus’ name and with a desire to honor Him with all of ourselves.

Banging My Head Against a Wall

Yesterday was one of those days when it felt like I was banging my head against a wall for 4 hours or more.  Dave and I set to the task of trying to figure out what is going on with our monitor system at the church.  It has this wicked awesome hum, and actually stopped working Sunday morning for all of second service, which was fun for my voice.  So we tore the whole stage down…everything, and started from scratch.  We trouble shooted the issue of the hum and 4 hours later had no solution. That can be so deflating.

I am working today on getting the stage set back up and the intention is to get the sound on the stage brought down.  We are getting too loud on the stage and hurting our hearing, not just what we hear but actual damage to our hearing.  By re-arranging we should be able to drop our levels and protect our hearing and allow Levi to get a better mix in the house which will help us sound better and not be so muddy(its a technical term…haha).

Hope fully the headbanging will only be intentional due to the awesomeness of the music and not the frustration of dumb equipment.