Dream's Awakening

I met a retired couple on the airplane yesterday. They turned out to be christians so I had a good conversation with them the whole flight. We happened on the topic of contemporary christian music. I told them that I thought modern christian music was good and at the same time bad. We were surprised to agree; unfortunately, much of modern christian music is lacking in depth and doctrine. It was strange coming to a passionate agreement about current music with a 60 year old couple. All this to say I'm more encouraged now more than ever to keep on working on my music.

I pray randomly though out the day just like the many christians do today. But sometimes, I wonder at the casual way that we approach God in prayer. I mean, would we speak to him like we typically pray if we were actually in the throne room of God? I feel like I sometimes don't show God enough respect when I pray. I see this lack of respect as me tending to forget the reality of the situation. The situation being that the infinite God of the universe is taking time out of his day to listen to me. At the very same time, we have every right to talk to him like a close friend. Jesus called us friends of God. It think it's critical for us to come to him in prayer unashamed and just as we are. I just have to remember not to loose sight of his holiness and majesty in light of me being able to "be me" in front of him. His grace and understanding towards us does not take away from his awe inducing splendor as He is Lord of all. 

Worship went well on Wednesday, or at least it wasn't horrible. It's times like these that I wish we had more time available to practice. Everybody has a hectic schedule, so it's hard to carve out 3-4 hours out of everyone's week. Our drummer even plays in 3 separate bands, he's crazy ( crazy good drummer too).  I have to remind myself  that we're not able to put all our time and effort into the music, as the majority of professional bands can do. So I shouldn't expect for us to sound like a professional band , right? Unfortunately I'm pretty stubborn , so no, I do expect for us to sound better than any other band out there. We have to keep on pushing ourselves and our schedules. The quality of our sound is directly linked to the quality of our practice. I get really frustrated sometimes (most of the time.... okay, almost all of the time) that worship doesn't sound as good as it should. I hold myself and the band to a very high musical standard. I can hear how the music should sound in my head, but it's another story to make the band actually sound like that. It's just a matter of hard work and time well spent. Well, here comes another weekend to practice. We'll give it all we got. 

Today's worship night. I lead worship at a small college group every wednesday night. I look forward to it every week, and it's stressful as junk every week too. Worship last for about 30 minutes every week. But it takes the band about 3-4 hours of practice, and me 2 or 3 more hours of prep time(getting music for the week, tweaking arrangements, creating power points that we use on laptops as sheet music, finding videos clips, etc). It's all worth it, I love doing it. I'm glad God has provided me a stable job that just takes up my days and I can devote my nights to music. It's hard as most of the time I come home tired and uninspired, so I just push myself. I believe that some day I will be able to create music for a living, but I'm far away from that day right now (and that's okay). I never plan to get paid to play for a church(nor have I ever), I know biblically a worship pastor has the right to get compensated financially for his work...but that's not how I roll. It's my personal conviction that , if at all possible, the leadership in the church should not burden the congregation financially. I think the modern church has made a horrible name for itself always asking people for money. I refuse to add to the enemy's ammunition against the church and God's people. 

So work is a bit stressful right now. I'm holding down the fort for another member of my group that quit, until they hire somebody new to replace him. So I'm responsible for everything east of texas now. When before it was just Texas and Arizona. It gets kinda nuts sometimes. I have to deal with people in Japan, Europe and Taiwan on a regular basis. It may sound cool, but the time difference can add complications to already complicated situations. It's definitely been a great learning and growing experience.