Aug 19
Hello senior year!
Today marks the first day of my last year at Clemson, and it looks to be a busy year. There’s a lot of work to do, a lot of fun to have, and a lot of life to live this year. It’s good to be back. My summer was pretty stellar too, but more on that later!
P.S. For those who were eagerly awaiting the song list from High School Beach Camp, no fear! It is coming. For those eagerly awaiting to hear about Ethiopia, you also shouldn’t fear. That is coming as well.
Whew… today has been one incredibly busy day!
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.
World rocking is what God is all about, and he did just that to mine yesterday. The last couple of weeks have been full of the frustrations of seeing Carrie go off to Russia, out of contact, and seeing guitar players commit to playing at Beach Camp, getting my hopes up, only to have them have to back out again due to various circumstances. It’s been an awesome learning and growing experience, but it’s also been hard and incredibly frustrating
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!
Sep 1
Picking up where part 1 left off…
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…
Aug 13
Now that I just finished my last day of work, all that’s left before the end of summer break is packing to move back. This seems to me like a good time to wrap a post-mortem of sorts for my summer.
Summer started with a pleasant twist for me. Another guitarist from Crusade was invited to play at Elevation Church in Charlotte, NC with Chris Brown. Now, in order to fully understand this, you must know that Chris has been my hero for some time. It wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to say he is the reason why I want to lead worship today. But anyway, I invited myself to tag along and visit Elevation. This trip largely set the tone for the rest of my summer. I was awesome to see how a church that has an attendance of ~4000 operates, and to see how a band comes together when the first time they play together is two hours before the service.
So, coming back from that trip and heading into the summer, I wanted to learn all I could about worship and what it’s really all about. I was also knew 100% that that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I began reading all I could and studying worship from a biblical standpoint( I still have quite a stack of books I’m trying to read through). I also began requesting information from seminaries, trying to start figuring out where I might like to go.
Now, during this early summer period there began a rumor that there were several people in my church interested in starting a contemporary service. This is something my church has lacked for many years, and when there was a contemporary service, it was kind of tossed to the side. It would be pushed to the gym, or it would be a very early service, basically not something designed to bring people in. So when I heard of this movement in the church, I was quick to contact those leading it to help out with the planning, and they were quick to hand over the entire music portion of the service to me. Going into it, we knew we had several major goals and obstacles ahead of us. First, we wanted it to be in the sanctuary at a time of day that would be convenient for the largest number of people. This became slightly easier because our church just installed a new multimedia system in the sanctuary, and a lot of people were interested in experimenting with that while we experimented with the service itself. Second, we realized that we didn’t have the resources to pull this off as a weekly service, and so we had to be sure to treat this as a compliment to the Sunday worship services and not a replacement. Third, we realized that we would need to build up resources in the Church fairly quickly(particularly musicians) if this service were to last past 6 months, and especially if we ever wanted to make it a weekly service. There was a lot of other stuff going on too, but these were the primary logistical obstacles in our path.
To be continued…
