about my musical weekend

This weekend was a good one...I played music with my band at Spring Hill on Saturday night for a Wild Game dinner...yeah, it is what you're probably thinking. A very Mississippi event where people brought in various animals they had hunted and prepared. For example, there was rabbit, wild hog, deer, etc. If you can kill it and cook it, it was probably there.

The meat (no pun intended) of the story for me, though, is that Friday night at practice I had some real pre-show jitters. As you may (or may not) know, I lead worship for our youth services on Wednesday nights. I'm still a novice at guitar (but improving weekly), but enjoy singing and doing what I feel God is telling me to do...lead others to Him through music.

Every week we have a rotating cast of musicians from our youth group come in and play/sing, and it's really this cool grassroots type of thing. We've put our own spin on some traditional and contemporary songs that get the kids a little more pumped than they are at our Sunday morning hymn-based worship hour. As fun as it is, however, it's a daunting task at times to direct people on what to do, especially since I am as previously noted a novice.

Back to the jitters: our only type of music that we play is Christian. Worship music, more specifically (is there any other kind?). I didn't know how well it would mesh with the crowd we were sure to have on Saturday night. I let a few people talk me into a nervous state, too. I was pretty unsure of how we'd sound/ what people would think about our performance...as were some of the people putting the event together (who asked us to play initially...go figure). So we practiced and it sounded okay, if a bit chaotic. We had 5 guitarists, including me, and relegating who plays what seemed to be a case of "no one is going to be happy". I was stressed.

Saturday seemed to be the longest day. We were to start practicing at 6:00 PM, and I woke up early that day. Luckily for me, my Dad knew the exact words to say. He called me randomly Saturday afternoon as I was fumbling around Wal-Mart aimlessly, and I just opened up. I was a little stressed and it showed. My Dad gave me some real words of encouragement about how we were doing what God called us to, and regardless of what people thought, the focus is on Him anyway. That calmed me more than Dad knew, and helped me to feel more comfortable and the jitters to go away.

So I don't know if we sounded okay or not on Saturday night. Maybe we did, maybe not. But it felt good, and it felt right. I think that's what matters anyway. We sang and played for God alone, and even got a round of applause. But the clapping meant almost nothing compared to the peace that came along with what I feel was our purpose.