February 5, 2011

The weekend so far, has been quite an experience for me... and I'm only on the second day of it. I've been on a journey of self-discovery, more appropriately called "God-discovery", for the past few weeks as I begin to realize that myself and the life I've lived hasn't been all scotch and chocolate. I've begun to realize that the life I've had personally, choices I've made, actions I've done, etc. has been filled with a lot of lies that I've believed for a long time. First off ... I live to bring glory and honor to God, not myself. Whenever I try to make myself more important, I always end up making a fool of myself .. huh funny how that works. :) Funny story: last month (I play monthly in our coop worship band that meets once a month) for worship I went to practice. Everything went fine the day of, we were sounding great, my guitar was in tune, everything was pretty good. Anyways, immediately after we played the ice breaker/opening game we went into worship. I got up on stage with the other worship team members and started playing ... bad news, my guitar somehow was horribly out of tune. I smiled and laughed it off and attempted to tune it on stage by myself by ear. Didn't work. I then tried tuning it quickly to the piano player. Thought I got it right but when I started playing once more, it still was really out of tune and so I just started playing ... thinking that it was worship ... It was about the heart and worshiping God not me and my playing ability. ANYWAYS ... I got halfway through the first song when one of the adult leaders comes up on stage, during worship, and asks me if there is any other guitar I can play with since mine sounds really bad. Luckily my friend had another guitar and so I switched to that and the service went great from there. Needless to say, I was utterly humiliated. Now this month. My guitar was fine for practice, the adult worship supervisor asked if my guitar was going to be fine this month and I confidently replied that it would be. During the games and intro, I even checked it 5 different times just to make sure. I wasn't going to have a repeat performance of last month. We start worship and wouldn't you know it my guitar wasn't in tune. Not as badly as last time but still not pretty. I didn't make eye contact with anybody in the audience, especially my other band members or the adult supervisor. I played through and it sounded ok but definitely off key. Well lets just say I was about ready to smash my guitar afterwards. Then I realized something. I asked God why this had happened, seemingly thinking He had something to do with it. The answer was in my motives. I realized that, due to a few other factors, I was trying my darnedest to look cool while on the worship band. I felt that I needed to show that I could hold my own at something (guitar) since many of my friends played guitar better than I. I wanted to impress people. My motives for worshiping and playing weren't right and so God completely humbled me. Now I think now that it was the heat that kept getting my guitar out of tune rather than God supernaturally untuning it but I can't help but think He had some part in allowing it to happen ... after all ... God knows all, sees all and plans all. He can use any circumstance for His purpose. Just another revelation that God's given me in recent days.