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.

Ok, so I heard from my wife on Thursday this week that the Library of Congress will be archiving all tweets retroactively to March 2006. That includes everything from "I just ralphed at this crazy party" to late breaking news, to anything else under the sun. That's roughly 55 MILLION tweets PER DAY.

Now there are obviously good things and bad things about this. We can all see that bad side. Drunken ridiculous tweets are going to be immortalized in the Library of Congress Archives where people a few hundred years from now are going to be seeing them and thinking we were insane. There's definitely that going against it.

I think this is a pretty cool idea. If you think about it, since the Library started archiving it has mostly been distinguished authors, journalists, newspapers, magazines, whatever. Which of course give a pretty good representation of culture. With Twitter being in the archives now it gives people hundreds of years from now a minute by minute timeline of our culture. It shows what topics were trending on any given minute of any day or month; everything from Justin Beiber, to American Idol to the President and politics. They will be able to hear from the mouths (or fingers) of individual American's what it was like living through a big recession, or what it was like having family members in the armed forces. Even things as simple as what it was like when their favorite celebrity won a dance show.

It's about time we started archiving exactly who we really are. Of course, this is going to downgrade us in the eyes of many in the years to come. At the same time though, it might be one of the easiest way to document history. We will be able to go back and say at any moment in history what was happening in different cities, states, and countries. We will be able to see what the scores were of sporting events, what the emotion was in the stadium as a team came from behind to take the victory in the biggest game of the year.

I think, as crazy as this might sound, this is a very good step in the right direction. Of course, there are plenty of downsides to it but over all I think it is a pretty cool idea.

It's amazing how fast technology moves these days. It's almost impossible to keep up with. I was just discussing with a friend the other day about how five or six years ago almost no one used text messages or even had the option on their phone. Now, it's almost the main form of communication for a lot of people. I got my first computer in high school about eight years ago and only used it for school work and listening to music. Now we use our computers for absolutely everything.

One thing that has caught my eye lately has been the Social Media trend. Even just a month ago I was sitting in my kitchen with a group of friends thinking that things like Twitter and Blogs were kind of nuts. I'm only 25 years old but sometimes I can act like I'm way older. In the last month or so I have embraced twitter and picked up blogging again.

A couple of weeks ago I convinced my family's business Garrison Law Firm (where I work) to embrace it as well and create a Facebook page for the business and to start a blog. When I first suggested it you would have thought I was from Mars or something. After a little explanation of how things like Facebook and a blog could really help advance the company's name my dad (the managing partner) agreed to it and I created the Garrison Law Firm facebook page. I am also in the process of creating a blog for the firm as well.