A Great Day w/ A Lesson Learned

So if you have paid attention to my statuses the past few days on Facebook, you would notice that I (and the other leaders of RWT) have been getting ready for our Reality Worship Workshop (which went GREAT, by the way!) But afterwards, I was thinking through the day..

We started off by spending time in prayer. We dimmed the lights and created a worshipful atmosphere. I sat down and started worshipping for a few minutes, and then I started thinking about the rest of the day - how we would practice the songs, if I would teach my leadership lesson well, etc.. when I suddenly thought.. "What am I doing? We are trying to lead our team into the presence of God and I'm sitting here trying to figure out what I want the Band to do on the Intro to one of our songs. That's not right. I need to worship." But then I got some worries.. What if we weren't ready? What if we had forgotten to bring something in the Reality Room? What if, what if, what if..

And then I realized that if me, Lauren, and Kayla tried to do this on our own, it would fail miserably. We needed God's help and God's direction and HIM to be the "first-hand" leader (if that made sense) of the workshop. Even if we spent the whole day in prayer, it didn't matter because we needed to be following HIS lead and his direction.

Now, we eventually turned the lights back on and moved on to other things and I let go of all the stress and everything that was building up.. I was completely at peace. And as we went on with our day, everything was falling right into place. We got our entire backstage area clean (something it hasn't been in a long time), we grew as a team, had some great ideas together, taught a bunch of leadership skills, learned from my dad, and got a bunch of practice in on some songs we haven't ever done before. (But plan on doing) The singers spent more time than scheduled in practice, but the result - some tight harmonies on a tight new song. (And their extra time they took gave me a chance to work with the band some more and get that song really cool.)

It seemed that as a team where things would usually be falling apart because of the stress we're keeping on top of God, things were falling right into place because we lifted that stress up and gave it to God and said, "Here, God. Do as you want. We're following your lead and your direction."

We need to do this in our lives more often. Not just for a big workshop you've been planning for. For everything in our lives - school, work, and for me, regular worship practices and services. We need to lift the stress we're trapping God under and give it to him. He'll always come through, and your results will be better than you could imagine.

Blogging Now!

As I look around, I see people blogging all the time! So, I decided I wanted to get in on all the fun! 

But more importantly, I want to use this as a place where I can come to remember all of the spiritual "checkpoints" in my life (if that even made sense) and never forget God's love, grace, and mercy he's revealed to me throughout my life.

Too often, we visit a camp or a conference and we have a life-changing experience. We've been baptized in the Holy Spirit. We felt a call to ministry. We truly felt God for the first time. All of these are real impacting, and you would think we remembered them forever.  But do we really?

We go on with life and (let's face it) we forget about it. We may remember that we have a call to full-time ministry, but we may not remember the impact it had on us the night we got called. I don't to become a "living just in the moment" Christian. I want to remember the life-changing experiences I had two years ago, and two years from now, I want to remember today's. 

I also feel like blogging will help me grow. I don't know exactly why. I've spent like ten minutes trying to figure out how to word this paragraph. Leaders in my life who are farther ahead in the journey than I am just have always said that. So I figured I'd give it a shot.

Now I am starting at a horrible time. (A week and a half before school starts back up.) So be on me to post new blogs often. 

Well I'm almost done with this "Intro" blog which means I'm about to dive into what looks like a really cool way to keep track of my spiritual journey and the things God has spoken to me about or revealed to me, etc. So...

Here I go!