After load in, we went to get a bite to eat before running through the night’s set. Well, it turns out there are approximately zero fast food places in Garden City. After driving a while, we did find a Wendy’s and had our dinner there. We have some really good food to look forward to this week, but we were on our on for Sunday.

When we returned at about 7:15, we started practicing for the night. The meeting starting at 8:30, so we thought we would have until about 8:10-8:15 to warm up and rehearse the songs. Turns out we were wrong. We actually had until about 7:45 before campers began to stream into the building and we had to clear the stage. This made us a little apprehensive since we were trying a lot of new things that night.

All credit to God, we ended up being reasonably well prepared for the night and God was good in allowing us to give acceptable praise to Him. The first couple of songs went a little south musically due to tuning issues, but that was only a big deal in the bands eyes. Overall the first worship meeting was a great success! Great music, great drama, and a great message straight from the Word

After the meeting we added a sub to the sound system(Sweet!) and had a rehearsal time for Monday morning(which you’ll hear about later, but went really well).

Please keep the band and me in your prayers as we continue to learn how to lead these students in worship to our King. Also be in prayer for Tony as he teaches us this week.

Work at Jobscope is always a huge part of the day, and today was particularly busy. The project I’m working on is beginning to wrap up. So now I’m in the process of getting all of the infrastructure in place to release it to the world. This mostly involves sending emails to lots of other people, waiting for replies, training others on how to use the software, etc.. Fun stuff! I will then probably spend most of next week working on another project before I head off for the summer. There are no fewer than 4 other web projects that I have to work on on the side. Realistically, probably none of them will even get started before I start my stretch of summer that I’ve been preparing so hard for, but there are one or two I would like to at least make some progress on before leaving. We’ll see how it goes.

I got a call from a girl in Russia today that made me smile. Though, it also kicked my brain into gear about preparing more for Ethiopia. I ended up making what will probably be my largest Wal-Mart run for the trip. At least I hope so, because the stuff I seem to need has a very high price density. Meaning I walk away with only a little bit of stuff and and lot out of my bank account. God had been very gracious, though, in continuing to provide support.

Tonight, I began gathering bags for Ethiopia and even began to put stuff in them! Packing for Ethiopia will be quite interesting because, in less than two weeks, I will have to pack a bag to go to Garden City for a week of leading worship, come home Friday afternoon, empty that bag hurriedly do laundry, and then repack that bag to leave early Saturday morning for Ethiopia. So it’s pretty important that I go ahead and get my packing organized now, and planning this far ahead doesn’t come natural to me.

Everything else for Ethiopia seems to be in order. I have all the medicine I’ll need for stomach bugs and Malaria prevention, I have a travel guitar on the way for some good ‘ole Jesus music, all my immunizations are good to go, and I’m all paid up on my trip expenses! Praise God for all of that! Now it’s just time to go.

Before going to Ethiopia, as mentioned before, I’ll be leading worship for a week in Garden City for a high school retreat. I’m incredibly excited about it, but nervous and anxious at the same time. Keeping God’s glory at the forefront of my mind and heart is always a challenge when I’m preparing to get on a stage anywhere and have a microphone put at my face, but it’s even more tempting to try and take that glory for myself when the camps become so large and the musical talent you work with is so good. It has been an incredibly frustration journey preparing for this camp, and that hasn’t been that much fun. In a lot of ways, though, I have to still pray for God to keep me frustrated and on my toes, because it’s in those times of frustration that I can’t find comfort in myself. I have to turn everything over to God and let him provide for everything. When I can get that right, it’s such a great and encouraging feeling. I just need to work on getting that right more often.

Please be praying for Beach Camp,  that the band would work well together during our rehearsal this Saturday, that we would keep the weight of what it means to lead worship on our hearts, and the God’s glory would be our primary objective; and for Ethiopia, that the support would come in for those who still need it, for God to be preparing those in Ethiopia that we will meet and share our lives with, and that God would be preparing the team for the work cut out for us, most importantly that we would trust God to be the strength and comfort in doing that work.

Yesterday, though, God decided to pour out several special blessing on me. The first was getting a voicemail from Carrie bright and early in the morning. I hate that I missed the actual phone call, but it gave me a big ‘ole dimple smile knowing that I would get to talk to her later that day. It was simple incredible to hear her voice again, and to be able to communicate in realtime again. That won’t be a gift easily forgotten after this summer.

The day wasn’t without its adventures. After going camping last weekend with some of the guys on the team going to Ethiopia this summer, one of my legs had become very irritated and swollen from bug bites and stings. I had to go to the doctor to get a shot in my rear, along with a bunch of drugs to try and keep it from becoming too bad. It also gave me an opportunity to fill my Malaria prescription for Ethiopia. I ended up  leaving the store with will over 100 pills for only $2.50!

Only God could have ended the day like he did. I had a great time of worship through song with a bunch of students who are in Laurens to work on people’s houses for the week. I get to do that again  tonight and Friday, and I’m really looking forward to it. I learned that there are over 40 of these camps that will take place this summer all over South Carolina. That is just awesome! Praise be to God!

I praise God and give Him thanks for delivering a lead guitar player as well. I know God only has great plans for that week, and I’m so excited to be a part of it!

I think I settle for good too often, but it can be a hard concept to grasp. How do I know when to deny something good to wait for something great? How do I know what good things I should get rid of to make room for great things? Is it ever possible for me to know? Is it something I really need to know? I consistently pray that Christ would align my will with His and that he would allow me to enjoy his greatness, but too often selfishness, greed, and an eagerness to grasp good things get in the way.

I finally implemented this plan this morning. While I knew this would be very helpful in praying more purposefully (as opposed to praying off the cuff), I was not quite prepared for the magnitude of things I needed to pray for. Each list I had just kept growing and growing. While it’s a little intimidating to look at everything at first, I’m excited about how this will shape the way I pray and spend time with God. Please be praying for me that I will be able to continue this and grow through it as well. If you haven’t tried this before, I encourage you to do so. If you want more details of how I’m doing it, I’d be happy to share.

Perhaps the funniest part of the night was that we spent the majority of the time tracking down one of the roadies for the band, instead of the band itself. The guy I went to the concert was on summer project with said roadie in Costa Rica for this past summer, and so this concert was largely a reunion for the two of them.

I also got talked into going to DCF this morning instead of Crosspoint. I had told a lot of people that I would visit DCF soon, and they held me to it. It wasn’t quite what I expected and it was really good. I always like seeing new styles of church and worship. The only downside is that I now have to catch up on Crosspoint’s John series online. Something I’ll have to do again when I go visit North Point Community Church later this month.

Once the group of us had gathered all of our goals for the new contemporary service, the preparation began. It actually turned out to be a lot harder to find an date the would work. It would appear that, during the summer, churches like to plan Sunday night activities. Go figure! Anyway, after scheduling and re-scheduling and running into conflict after conflict, we finally managed to secure July 13 as the date for the first service, a little more than a month out. At the time, I was incredibly dissapointed that we hadn’t been able to find a June date, but as it turns out, only God knew how much preparation we really needed.

Now, the band was made up of guys who I had played with for several years before when we played in our youth group praise band. What I hadn’t fully prepared for was the fact that it would take a little while to get the band, as a whole, warmed up again. While I had been playing with Campus Crusade the year before, these guys haven’t had anywhere to play. So, just from a music standpoint, a June service could have been disasterous. But as it was, we had plenty of time to get rolling. Practice was held in my bedroom(pictures of the setup are on this blog somewhere) and we had a lot of fun jamming together. We started with a pool of 10 songs that we wanted to be ready to play. This was a lot, but in the very beginning of all this, the idea was to have worship concerts and not services. When we morphed the whole thing into a true worship service, the set list was cut to 6 songs.

Everything was going fine and dandy until, a couple of weeks before the service, my keyboardist informed me that he was going to be gone to visit family that weekend. This wouldn’t have been so bad except that I had been learning how to do more with programming and synth instruments and he was the one responsible for doing all of that stuff. At first, it wasn’t too bad. We simply cut back on are use of piano and synth, and what we absolutely had to have, we gave to other band members. As we got closer to the service, though, it was clear the music was lacking. Finally, a week before the service, I gave another guitarist from Campus Crusade a call, to see if he would be willing to give some time to help us out. Being such short notice, I didn’t expect him to do it, but he was gracious and decided to make the trip to play with us. The addition of the second guitar and the mandolin added more that one would think, and really rounded out the sound.

The Saturday before the service was spent at the church figuring out how everything would work and performing a runthrough/extended band practice. That turned out to be an extremely long day (about 8 hours at the church), but was very helpful in allowing us to gather everything we needed and to be prepared for any technical issues that we would encounter (there turned out to be quite a few).

Finally, Sunday arrived. The service was set for 6:00 that night, we arrived at about 3:30 to convert the sanctuary to accomidate our service and to set up our gear. At 4:30, our guitarist arrived and we ran through everything with him for the first time. Then at about 5:15, the band went off to have a bite of pizza before the service. At 5:45, we were heading back to the sanctuary, not knowing what to expect. One of my biggest fears was that we would put all of the effort into preparing this service: convincing the church staff, preparing the band, and bringing in a speaker and then have only 10 people show up. God rewarded our work, though, and we ended up with about 140 people (out of a congregation of 400). The service was incredible and pumped up our whole comittee in anticipation for the next one, annouced for August 10. Playing the music for this service also allowed the Micah Lee Band to get invited to play at some pretty awesome events, more on that later though. Overall, God had granted us success in almost everything we had endeavored, we was incredible considering that we often focused too much on the service itself and not who it was for. We would learn quickly what it was really all about in preparation for the second service, but that will have to wait until next time…