I had a really cool opportunity this past weekend to head home to Michigan and lead worship for a friend's church. Their worship pastor just left rather suddenly, and they needed a fill-in; I had the time and felt God's leading to take the job, so for most of this month I'll be commuting back home every weekend. It'll be a lot of driving - by the end of the month I'll have spent something like 27 hours in the car just to and from Michigan - but it's good quiet time, and at least the Michigan part of the drive is simply beautiful this time of the year.
One of the things that struck me as I talked with people after the service was how appreciative everyone seemed to be of how worshipful the service was... The first person who said something about it was an old friend from another church, and I thought, oh, isn't that sweet - I'm so glad you had such a cool time with God this morning... and with the second person who said something about it, I thought, oh, cool - I did my job. But after the fourth and fifth comments, I thought, gee whiz, what usually happens here on Sundays?!
I'm reading this absolutely great book by Mike Pilavachi called For The Audience Of One - and one of the points he makes is that worship isn't for us. Ultimately it really doesn't matter whether we feel anything at all - the point of worship is to direct to God what is rightfully His - our attention, our gifts, hearts, minds, souls, praise, glory, adoration, etc... The irony is that we do usually - if we've truly worshiped - receive something back from God - but if we didn't, it wouldn't - or shouldn't - matter.
I don't know. I've always thought leading worship required a bit of schizophrenia - but the deeper I get into this thing, the more I'm realizing that it's just a really weird job.
Wouldn't trade it for anything, tho...
No comments:
Post a Comment