I’ll admit it.  My prayer life is probably the one area of my Christian walk that needs the most work.  And yes, learning how to pray and pray consistently is work, but as we learned in The Truth Project last night, the word ‘work’ has been twisted into an ugly thing instead of the privilege that God gave to us.

Pastor Wade encouraged and challenged us to just plain spend time with God, to “trust in Him at all times…pour out your heart before Him, (because) God is a refuge for us.”  He encouraged men to realize that we can’t afford to NOT be praying and we have to model it for our families.  Good, good stuff.

We sang:

• Psalm 9 (a great lead/echo song right from Scripture)
• Oh Lord, You’re Beautiful (classic Keith Green)
• Sweet Hour of Prayer
• Strong Tower (Furler/Taylor)

The transition to EasyWorship seems to be going well, but we still need to work on getting some bugs out like making sure all the songs are on the default text so that it’s large enough and making sure songs and Scriptures are broken into more manageable screens.

And another fantastic part about yesterday…spending time with my daughter (lots of laughs from peek-a-boo and shoulder rides!) while being able to let my wife rest and catch up on some much needed sleep.

This week, since the Scribit widget in the sidebar has been utilized, we’ll look at different ways to worship God and not just on Sundays.

Yesterday’s service was great.  Really great.  For the first time in a long time, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the Holy Spirit was guiding the service.  I know this all of the time, but yesterday I was completely certain.

There were a few reasons:

First, I thought I had everything ready to go by loading the EasyWorship service onto a flash card to bring to church (our church is a church plant and currently runs off of a laptop that is in different hands from week to week).  The only problem was, I forgot my flash card reader.  Whoops!

Thankfully, the volunteer that was going to run EasyWorship was willing to run home and grab her copy of the file since she didn’t live too far away.  And, thankfully, she seemed to forgive my ridiculous lack of preparation.  Hence, she wins volunteer of the month award.  Thank you so much, Lisa!

So, Rock Star Volunteer Lisa runs home and grabs the service.  We’re good to go.

Second, during our prayer time in the service I was feeling led that we should sing the last verse of the hymn we had just sung after the prayer time was finished.  When the prayer time was finished, Pastor Wade walks next to me and whispers, “Let’s sing that last verse again.”  God still moves, folks!

Third, Lisa again proved her rock-star-ness by following along perfectly even though some verses in songs ended up getting skipped and/or repeated.

God was in control yesterday, not anyone else, and it was awesome!

The most important thing that I learned from yesterday’s service was that God is above anything we can imagine, but even though He’s able to take care of all the details if we think we’ve messed them up, we still need to make sure we’re properly prepared and we properly prepare those we’re working with.

Well, as you’ve noticed, I haven’t been writing a lot lately. To be completely honest I’m a little bit dry.

Enter scribit.

At the top of the right sidebar is now a nifty little widget that you can easily and anonymously tell me what to write about! So, if you have a burning question about worship ministry that you’ve been wondering about, go ahead and type it in.

The cool thing is that others can vote on the suggestions. So if I get a handful of votes for one suggestion, I’ll definitely write about it. Fire away.

Sunday was a bit of an odd day at Living Word for me, as my wife and I had the pleasure of being involved in the nursery!  As a result of this, we weren’t able to hear the message during the worship time, but I was able to listen to it online this morning.  It was a great privilege to work in the nursery (a little crazy, but a great privilege!)

Sunday songs:

• Almighty (Watson)
• Blessed Be Your Name (Redman)
• Blessed be the Lord, God, Almighty (Fitts)
• All Creatures of our God and King (traditional hymn)

The worship team did a great job this past Sunday.  It was nice to just be in the congregation with no responsibilities.  The one thing I would love to see us all work on is transitions between songs.  Helpful things to do are to wait until after the first song to encourage the congregation through spoken word (instead of talking before the first song and having silence in between the first and second), or picking songs that are in the same key that can flow seamlessly into one another.  But other than these minor things, my mind was led to focus on Jesus and I was able to sing to Him with minimal distraction, so thanks worship team!

I always have to laugh when I sing “All Creatures,” however, because I always picture the skit of Mr. Bean in church trying to sing along and not knowing where to end the “alleluia’s!”  Alleluia!  Alleluia! Allelu—ya..ya…y..y…ya! 🙂

Pastor Wade shared a fantastic sermon on ‘profitable pain.’  God will use anything to bring glory to Him, and in order to grow in our faith, often the process will be painful.  We can’t short-circuit this process of growth by trying to avoid pain.  And God is with us through all of it.  Good stuff and one that I will be listening to at least one or two more times this week.

Because our Truth Project hosts were out of town and we had a ministry event Sunday night, as was able to share a relaxing evening with family, which was so needed.

A great day.

For those of you who don’t use RSS to read iamanoffering I apologize that the site keeps looking different on you! There was some slight problems with the last site theme I was using and I needed to switch again. I will be doing a custom design and switching one more time in a few weeks, but I apologize that things keep changing!