My "amazing message"...hijacked
My previous pastor's gave me some wisdom over the years and one of those pieces of advice was to never let someone vent at you before you preached. Well today I had that experience but it wasn't something I could avoid.
Every Sunday we meet in SilverCity Mission to have our Sunday worship gatherings. As you can imagine, that sucker's a beast and someone's gotta clean it. The company that cleans it works extremely hard to get it cleaned for us but over the last few weeks we've been having some altercations with our paths crossing at the wrong time and things said that were taken way out of context.
This morning it all came to a head.
Last week I emailed the theatre and told them what was going on and requested that the cleaning crew be out by 9. I knew I could potentially stir the pot and open a can of worms and sure enough, it opened this morning...just what I needed.
So the manager comes to me and tells me that we can't use the right wing where we usually have UpStream Kids and that we just need to stay away from each other (the janitors and us). So as you can imagine, a wrench got thrown in to the morning at that point and I was set off. It just screwed my whole line of thought up completely.
The head janitor came and talked with me and we ended up getting things smoothed out to a certain degree but I was still off.
Needless to say, when it was my time to get up and speak, I felt like I was in a padded room all by myself. It had nothing to do with the people that were there, it had to do with the fact that I was distracted. It's hard to explain and only those that do any sort of speaking know that focus is everything, especially when you are trying to speak from memory. There are just some days when things flow out of me so smoothly and then there are days like today when I feel like I'm dragging it out and just slapping it on the table.
But you know what is interesting about this? As I sit here, I'm reminded of the fact that we were talking about the fact that God works best in weakness. Interesting. Maybe if I'm always trying to serve a gourmet meal with my words, God doesn't have as much opportunity to show himself strong.
This is verified by the stories I heard from people after the gathering that said that they feel like TXC is helping to resuscitate their faith and that God really spoke to them in the gathering. I'm trying to learn to not have a false humility by saying "Dude it wasn't me...trust me". I'm trying to just say a simple "Thank you". I never said it but it definitely wasn't me today. It never is but today I was just reminded even more that I really don't know what I'm doing and that what happens through TXC is definitely not a reflection of how cool I am or how skilled I am. The day I start thinking I'm something special is the day that TXC starts to crumble.
Every Sunday we meet in SilverCity Mission to have our Sunday worship gatherings. As you can imagine, that sucker's a beast and someone's gotta clean it. The company that cleans it works extremely hard to get it cleaned for us but over the last few weeks we've been having some altercations with our paths crossing at the wrong time and things said that were taken way out of context.
This morning it all came to a head.
Last week I emailed the theatre and told them what was going on and requested that the cleaning crew be out by 9. I knew I could potentially stir the pot and open a can of worms and sure enough, it opened this morning...just what I needed.
So the manager comes to me and tells me that we can't use the right wing where we usually have UpStream Kids and that we just need to stay away from each other (the janitors and us). So as you can imagine, a wrench got thrown in to the morning at that point and I was set off. It just screwed my whole line of thought up completely.
The head janitor came and talked with me and we ended up getting things smoothed out to a certain degree but I was still off.
Needless to say, when it was my time to get up and speak, I felt like I was in a padded room all by myself. It had nothing to do with the people that were there, it had to do with the fact that I was distracted. It's hard to explain and only those that do any sort of speaking know that focus is everything, especially when you are trying to speak from memory. There are just some days when things flow out of me so smoothly and then there are days like today when I feel like I'm dragging it out and just slapping it on the table.
But you know what is interesting about this? As I sit here, I'm reminded of the fact that we were talking about the fact that God works best in weakness. Interesting. Maybe if I'm always trying to serve a gourmet meal with my words, God doesn't have as much opportunity to show himself strong.
This is verified by the stories I heard from people after the gathering that said that they feel like TXC is helping to resuscitate their faith and that God really spoke to them in the gathering. I'm trying to learn to not have a false humility by saying "Dude it wasn't me...trust me". I'm trying to just say a simple "Thank you". I never said it but it definitely wasn't me today. It never is but today I was just reminded even more that I really don't know what I'm doing and that what happens through TXC is definitely not a reflection of how cool I am or how skilled I am. The day I start thinking I'm something special is the day that TXC starts to crumble.
