-Psalm 103:1
Last Saturday my church had a praise night for the young adult and youth groups. We've had a couple before, which I've really enjoyed. In all but one of the worship nights I've led the praise, which has been a great blessing. Last Saturday, I was leading on guitar and vocals. The first song went great, but then something unexpected happened on the second song; a guitar string broke. Naturally, I panicked, but I continued to sing until the song was over. After the song, I looked around for another guitar to replace mine, but there were no functional guitars at the church.
Every time that I have ever done praise, I always played an instrument. I play drums for Sundays, and guitar for Friday meetings. Now that the guitar was broken, I had to lead with only my voice. If you know me, you know that I really have a hard time trusting other people. Normally when I lead praise on guitar, I play very aggressively because I think that I have to pick up the other musicians' slack. When I had no guitar to play with on Saturday, I had to rely on the other musicians, which was quite troubling to be honest.
As the praise night continued, there were definitely many mistakes from the praise team, because we were not prepared for what happened. I was a bit bothered by the amount of mistakes, mostly because I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to music. However, even through the mistakes, I still was able to praise God. I felt that God was speaking through these songs, and nothing could take away from that. After the praise night, a couple of us went to Silver Diner, where some of the people told me about how encouraged they were at the praise night. I was thankful to God for using a broken team of musicians to lead others to praise Him.
I learned a couple things from this praise night, that I think are applicable to anyone who leads worship.
- Trust the others on your team. If you don't trust them, how can they trust you? How can you grow as a team if you constantly take over the praise? Believe me, I am guilty of not trusting the other people on praise team, but I learned that trusting them is important.
- Learn to be self-sufficient. What I mean by this is that you should be able to play songs without needing anyone else playing with you. This is especially important if you are the leader, but it is important for all members of the team. I think this is even true if you are the drummer, because there are times where the guitar or piano stops working for whatever reason, and you have to be able to keep the song going.
- God can use broken people to praise Him. In fact, we are all broken. Whether the praise is good or bad, nothing we do can make us better in God's sight. Jesus came so that He could heal the broken, and so that we can praise Him. Don't worry too much about the music.
- Keep praising God. No matter what happens, a guitar string breaking, sound system failing, guitar out of tune, keep praising God. This is true also of life. No matter what happens in life, keep praising God. He is worthy of all our praise, and we grow closer to Him through praise.
-Smart
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