Who? Me??

[KEY:PEOPLE] Okay, so i kinda did a crazy thing. on friday night i asked a non-musician to cover worship for me this weekend. It makes perfect sense to me, but perhaps not to the average joe so let's lay it out...

WORSHIP is what? Intentional turning toward God? A time to remember what's He's done and praise Him for what He will do? Simply exalting Him for who He is, speaking His name? Loving Him? These are things we traditionally do in 'worship time' and we traditionally do it with music. Right. But not exclusively. Right?? Honestly, my favorite definition of worship is simply responding to who He is -- we can't even worship unless He enables us to, unless we first can see Him. the more we see, the more we say 'yes, oh Lord, you are great, i am in awe of you, i love you'. that's worship. if, in response, my voice wants to sing it, or play it out that's cool. others may express it through visual art, or movement. whatever our response... those are the vehicle for the outcome, and the outcome is what's in our hearts. so this morning, as every sunday morning, i wanted to give our kids a chance to connect with the living God, to hear from Him and to see and understand more of who He is with a chance to give voice to their hearts' response. now if YOU were the one responsible to see this growth and experience happen in our kids, would it be more important to you to employ a person with stellar guitar skills and a beautiful voice OR someone who had a personal love relationship with the Lord and the abilities to relate to and connect with kids, meeting them in their world? i mean, IF you had to choose.

Surely you would want the one who is passionately in love with Jesus and had a track record of passing that passion on to our kids. case in point: Erin Hibben. and, honestly, it's not that i went looking to give her MORE things to do :) but i did feel that the Lord put a spotlight on her and said to ask her to lead worship this week. so i did. and i got all the responses you might think... "but i don't sing... i don't play an instrument... i don't know how to do that!! and, really, aren't i doing enough already?..." and yet, she knew that if GOD was prompting then it was pointless to resist. i love her for that. and it's true - i wasn't asking her as my last resort - i felt God said ask her as your first resort. so i did. and she did! and i can't wait to hear the outcome of her saying yes. not that we always see the results immediately...

Sometimes it is enough to be obedient to the Lord by saying yes, and let Him handle the outcome, and i believe this even includes how we feel about it. in fact, i feel so strongly that we need to live from this place that i may have to write a separate entry about that sometime -- God only asks us to give our best and trust the rest to Him. our job is the sewing and we must trust Him with the timing of the reaping and to bring forth the kind of harvest/fruit HE has in mind -- not us. who would dare say they know what this is all going to look like in the end. not only do i have no idea how to get there, i'm not even sure i know where i'm going!

But this whole "revolution" is all God's idea anyway -- His kids, His thing, we're just along for the ride wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee