I knew it. I just knew. On Saturday night, I posted to twitter “My Sunday worship set is done”. It seemed like such an innocuous comment at the time, but a couple of hours later I had a real funny feeling. For no reason at all, I went back to my account and re-read what I had written.
The second time around it seemed… funny… almost poignant in some strange, adumbrated way.
That night, I woke at 3:00am and tossed and turned for a good half hour before I started to pray. While I was praying, I realized I hadn’t fully given up the worship ministry in my heart and needed to do so. So I prayed about it. It was a quick prayer, nothing fancy — no bells or whistles, no trumpets of angels or anything odd that signified it was done. In fact, when it was all over I just felt “okay”. I can’t even say I was at peace about it; it was just one of those things I knew I had to do simply because I was being asked to. So I turned it in, like the badge and gun of a seasoned cop. A done deal. After that, I knew Sunday was the end of worship for me, even though a replacement worship leader hadn’t come forward. I had faith that something was going to happen.
And it did. Church was really weird yesterday and I can’t explain why. I mean, I know why it was weird, I’m just not sure I could put it into words. You’re just going to have to trust me that the whole thing was weird. The worship service was just… the strangest one I’ve ever done, not to mention the shortest. Everyone was distracted for one reason or another, myself included. People were coming in and out, totally late (per usual) and I found it a lot more distracting than I typically do. And there was this guy — when he came in, there was a group of people in back who were really excited to see him and it added to the distraction. When he came up for communion, along with everyone else, for some reason I happened to look up when he was near my piano and I realized that for some inexplicable reason I was smiling, and oddly enough, he was looking at me and smiling — we were both grinning at each other like idiots. Why the hell were we smiling? I don’t even know. Then I went back to the worship set thinking just how weird that was. It was all just weird, man.
I ended worship early because I was so distracted. Afterward, I confided in a good friend of mine, Yvonne, what had happened the night before and that I knew worship was going to be resolved that day. She said she’d be praying.
Sure enough, an hour after I got home, I got a call from my pastor saying someone had come forward and said that they felt that the worship was something they were supposed to do.
My response: So when do they start????
No start date yet, but I’m praying it’s ASAP. I still have the Christmas Eve service to do on Thursday which is fine (I guess). I’m ready for change in a really strange way… Now I’m ready for the next step, though I’m not really sure what that means.