People see the guitars hanging up in the Hawaii house and say, do you play? No, I might play again someday. The guitars would not even be there but for the love of my neighbor John Sovitsky in Fredericksburg, who had the knowledge to pack and ship them.
At the New City Fellowship church startup there was a need for servants and that included the praise band. I had played guitar since a young teen, largely because of advice from my black sheep uncle Donny, "if you want to get the girls, learn to play the guitar". When I went to school in Hawaii, one of our rec classes was ukelele and that was a fun instrument. Jamming with friends was a good social experience and my parents and siblings were patient in this respect, as were my shipmates on the USS Kennedy.
Nothing prepared me for being in the praise band under Carol Becker. She somehow had that special gift from God to play cross culturally, modern praise, black spiritual, latino, carribbean. I was hanging on by a thread. When I wasn't a strong member of the team, I could see her eyes flash, but she never said a cross word and tried to coach me from time to time.
Little did I know I would soon be the worship leader in the Kairos prison ministry, drawing deep on what I had learned under Carol.
I will never look at the praise band of a church the same. The stresses and forces of serving in that capacity are outrageous. One second you are afraid you are doing it wrong, or worse, certain you are.
But what you will never be prepared for until it happens is that moment, you are in the groove, people have their hands up high, you feel like a successful performance artist. I was feeling like a rock star when I was supposed to be worshipping. Yikes!
The people that have that unique gift to play skillfully and actually worship the LORD have been greatly blessed by God. For me, at least for now, I am content to let those guitars hang on the wall. Once you step into the shoes of a praise team member, you will never think about Hebrews 13:15 the same, "Through Him then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name."
Pride is a sneaky little sin. I've been blessed to have accomplished some incredible things in the cybersecurity world. But, there, I have always known that I simply had a front row seat to watch and see what God was going to do. I think all of us have areas where we think we do it in our own strength and cleverness. Danger Will Robinson. The worst thing about pride is that it makes it hard to apologize, to be genuinely sorry when we make a mistake. Hurts and slights don't heal and sometimes fester and that makes the world just a bit harder than it has to be.
The next post in this series is pro-life.
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