Chase the Setting Sun...

As you have probably noticed thus far; I have been going over what makes a worship service good, in particular, the worship music. This seems to be one of those things that, depending on how you look at it, is either really simple or really difficult. Much of the time it's insanely difficult for me, I think, because I am always over analyzing it based on my knowledge of music.

Take today for example. We played some older songs during our worship set. Not to us by Chris Tomlin, We Fall Down, How Great is our God, and Mighty to Save by Laura Story. Pretty basic worship songs. The beginning of our opening set my amp malfunctioned and Matt, our pastor for today, had to vamp for a few minutes while I figured out what was going on.

We finally got everything together and played through the first song ok. The second song the slides were wrong and we lost our place and ended the song incredibly awkwardly all at different times. The next two songs towards the end went fine.

Being who I am (a music nazi) I was ripping myself apart the rest of the day because the beginning of the service went bad. Talking to people after the service though, and my wife later, apparently no one really noticed the apparent train wreck I felt was occurring and thought we did a great job. So either I'm completely nuts or everyone was lying to me.

Now I'm sure it wasn't quite as bad as I imagine, I always am ridiculously hard on myself about these things. I know that God can break through our crap and still show Himself through technical difficulties and missed song endings. I shouldn't worry about that. The problem is, and maybe it's not really a problem, I take my job so seriously that every little mistake I take upon myself for not rehearsing the band well enough or not preparing well enough myself. I mean, I'm the leader, if something goes wrong it's my fault, even if someone else is the one that forgets something or makes a mistake. It has to be my fault for not rehearsing them well enough.

Anyway, from what I was told after, the music went fairly well. So does it really matter all that much in a worship service if the music is stellar or we play the coolest, hippest, new worship songs? I guess not. All that matters is that we are true to the reason we are there, to worship God. If we hang on to that God will break through our mistakes and show Himself to those worshiping with us.

Maybe someday I'll get over it and stop killing myself for minor mistakes and details...ok probably not, but at least after letting off some steam I can realize that God is a Bizillion times bigger than me and nothing I do can get in His way.