Two more from Acceptable.tv:

Superhawk

Prison Prison Break

“You literally just double click on the application’s icon and the program opens right there for you on the screen — in a matter of minutes!”

I really don’t know what to say to myself about this. Am I angry? Am I worried? Am I just tired and wary because of all the ways I’ve been crapped on and abused?

That last part is actually a quote from my pastor when we met last night over an explosion of chocolate - when we first met a year ago, I appeared to be someone who had been used and abused by other churches. Some of that’s true and some of it’s not. The church, overall, is a beautiful and wonderful thing. I truly believe that and it angers me when I hear people say otherwise. The real difficulty is some of the individuals who unknowingly crap all over you.

For the most part, these individuals mean well and in many cases they don’t realize they are even doing it. They just want to help in their own way and don’t see that what they say or do is tearing you down. Some of them do realize it, and they’re doing it to make them feel better about themselves. As it goes with basic fundamentals of humanity, people are often left thinking about themselves and their own feelings and everyone else be damned. This is why some of us get cussed out in the back right before we’re stepping out on stage to lead a worship set on a beautiful Sunday morning — then half the congregation wants to know why the worship felt “weird” that morning. Too bad you can’t give them an honest answer.

Looking back over the last twenty years of my life, I can’t help but wonder if maybe I was doing it wrong. I wasn’t the one who wanted to lead the big Sunday morning worship services — I let the worship leaders with “groupies” handle those. And when we’d have meetings, these young, noobie worship leaders would look at me like I was crazy because I wanted the Sunday night services.

Tell you what. Have your flashy Sunday morning services with your swanky sets and your latest and greatest songs that all the kids want to hear. Give me the Sunday evening and weeknight services. Guess why? Because the majority of people who show up to the Sunday night and weeknight services are there for one reason and one reason alone: to experience God. Sunday mornings are more of a mixed bag, plus you get the people who haven’t spent any time with God during the week, and completely expect you to jump start them and give them their dose of weekly spirituality. From a spiritual standpoint, it’s harder to do, like pulling a heavy sack up a mountain. No thanks. Give me the less glamorous sessions instead.

Let me say this now: I will never be the “favorite worship leader” in the church. And if I ever get to that point where I am, I will turn this farking car right around. The reason for that is simple: I do not lead worship for anyone’s enjoyment. What comes out of a worship set is a product of what the Spirit of God is doing at that moment and if you don’t like it, tough. You can try to lead your own worship set and manufacture sentiments on your own — plenty of people do it, preying upon people’s emotions. That’s not my gig. In my opinion, there’s nothing worse than cruising through a worship set at mach 10, then suddenly realizing God made a left turn about two verses and a chorus ago. You can keep going if you want, but the rest of the worship service won’t be as good. My suggestion is that you suck it up, go back, and make the left turn.

A few years ago I ended up leading worship in a church that, for some odd reason, started worrying too much about the latest and greatest worship sets. They really wanted younger sounding sets that really rocked.

I have no problem with that. Really. Except at that one point, when everyone became too worried about writing their own songs and being generally too awesome for words.

The guy who took over worship started having meetings with me about this, because basically I’m me: The more adamant you get about asking everyone to act retardedly, the more adamant I’m going to become about not doing it. And you’ll be mad. But I’ll keep doing it. With a smile. The worship dude kept meeting with me and he would say how he wished I would do younger, more thrashing type sets because “that’s what the kids want!” but then he’d turn right around in the same breath and say he can’t figure out how I can get corporate worship to happen the way I do. “Everyone is really worshiping God - how do you do that?”

I’m not retarded?

Here’s a hint: It’s not manufactured crap. I’m not here to play on people’s emotions. There are plenty of churches who will do that and I don’t go to them.

Then I ended up at another start-up church, where I was the sole worship leader of every single service and home group for a couple of years. I won’t lie, it’s a lonely place to be. It’s also draining and inconvenient, because your whole existence as a church leader is about being inconvenienced and crapped on because everyone has an opinion and those who don’t need to suck up all of your time because they want you to mentor them. It’s tiring. So I got married, moved to the middle of nowhere, and stopped going to church for about a year and a half.

After so many years of going through this, I’m tired and stressed and angry because I’m tired of being the black sheep. But I hate bad worship, and it bothers me that I’m just sitting in the back when I know I can do something to fix things. Every church service makes me more and more angry because I’m watching noobs make stupid noob decisions. It’s not their fault — a lot of us get thrown into worship because we’re often the only one who can play an instrument or sing. Sometimes we can’t even do one of those well, and yet we’re handed a microphone and expected to lead worship. We learn through trial and error, mostly error, and for some of us it’s harder to figure out than most. I’ve had 20 years of trial and error, so last night, my pastor finally came out and told me how everything was going and basically begged for help. I felt bad, so I offered to help.

I don’t know how I feel about it. I can’t promise to know everything there is to know, even with all of my experience. I can’t promise to be able to fix everything, because worship is such a strange thing. A person can know all there is to know about it, but then miss what God is doing. This spells disaster for a worship set. Everyone has a time or two when they’re just having an “off night,” so to speak. The same is with worship. I could jump into this and it could be a disaster.

I think I’m just tired of being the one swimming upstream.

Let’s start by talking about how I’m feeling. Yesterday afternoon, one of the girls from HR called me to say, “I’m sending an email to your boss that is about you and confidential, so please do not read it.”

I knew it was about my promotion, but I still stressed out about it for three hours. My boss finally came back and told me how he was working out details with HR about the promotion, and in the end HR was going to formally tell me — we don’t know why they wouldn’t let my boss do it. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to my boss or me, but HR doesn’t normally make much sense.

This morning, I saw the HR chick on the escalator and she said, “Hey, I have to talk to you today. I’ll call you!” And she made that phone-call-signal with her hand to her ear. I knew it was about the promotion, and I know I already have it, but fifteen minutes later the stress-induced migraine came on anyway — the kind that screws up your vision for the next 45 minutes.

It’s two grande coffees and four Advils later (2:00pm) and she still hasn’t called. And I know she hasn’t forgotten about me, because she was up at my desk around 11:00am chatting with me about hairstyles and the pants she’s wearing and the necklace she bought to go with the pants, and one or two work-related topics.

An hour after she left, I succumbed to the curiosity and stress and tried to open the email she had sent about me, but it is encrypted so I can’t read it unless I go to my boss’ computer to read it. Which I could, but I won’t.

I don’t know why I’m stressing out about this.

In the meantime, I’m still trying to finish up one of the chapters that I’ve been working on for the WOW/LoO related guild story.

It was a good idea to start with. The whole point was to practice my writing, by just forcing myself to pound out whatever came to mind quickly, in short, stupid chapters. No plotting, no planning, just writing.

I’m on chapter three, and I’ve been staring at it for nearly 3 weeks now. It’s not going the way I planned - and that’s where I’ve gone astray, I think, because the point wasn’t to plan. It was to write something funny and stupid. Unfortunately this is not the way chapter 3 has gone at all. It turned out a bit more serious than I wanted it to be, because it’s developing a plot. It’s also developing the characters and some of the character interactions, but it’s gotten longer than I wanted, and more serious than I wanted.

No, that’s not correct either. It is what I envisioned, and maybe that’s what is bugging me. But it’s longer and now I’m feeling the pressure to put out another chapter that is as good as the last one. And it’s different than the chapter 2, which was totally different from chapter 1.

I’m afraid of this sucking.

Now I’m about two and a half weeks late in getting this thing out, and I’m paranoid about the writing itself sucking. Now I stare at the page, the sentences that I want to put down are running through my head, but I can’t force them out. I can even envision the words in my head - I know exactly what sentences I need to type out, but I’m so afraid of it sounding like the writing of a second grader that I can’t force myself to type. So I sit and stare at the page for an hour, loathing the chapter itself. And there’s some good stuff in there, I’m totally happy with a lot of the content because I need it for other chapters later, I just can’t continue because of stress and worry and self-loathing. I’m sick of looking at this chapter and I just need it to end.

Meanwhile, my head continues to run ahead and cook up the story. Now I have enough information in my head for a few chapters, but I can’t get past chapter 3 because I’m too worried about it sounding like garbage.

Does this flow? Are the sentences too basic? Do I suck with the language and grammar? Maybe my style is horrible! I don’t know. I wanted these chapters to be no more than 5 or 6 pages, but I’m already on page 7 (3000 words) and I am worried that it’s too long.

I hate this chapter. I want it to die.