so in the past 24 hours, i left what seemed like a week long event in the nywc. it actually can be around 5 days, but i was only there two. it seemed like forever with all that would be contained in a day. i gave jason the lift home since his pickle hit a deer & getting it better has proved more time consuming than first thought. that was excellent to trade childhood stories, process some of the convention, talk about whatever stemmed from those topics.
i got home around 9:30 or 10pm, so i missed out on getting with the youth praise team's saturday run through for this mornings services. my job was the visuals & the big change for this service was to finally get a way to do two screens off one monitor. we'd tried a couple of different hookups in prior weeks. this one i was anticipating a vga splitter to come in the mail. it hadn't come by the time i left for convention, so i hoped it would come in while i was gone.. the hope after that is that i could find it somewhere in the church.
after staying up way to late working on the song set in opensong and liveworship, plus some blogging as my mind tangented. i was off to bed only to wake a few hours after to get to the church by 7am to get set up. for some reason there are around 25 people who show up and sit down in the sanctuary 30 to 40 minutes before the 8:15 morning service. not sure why... seems so odd to me. my hope was to get set up before they got there. that didn't happen, it took me a quite a bit of time to find our super important splitter cable. i wondered if it made it, worried it didn't (actually panic'). i hate for folks to complain about stuff and the usual complaint is "we couldn't see the words." to remedy that we have to do the piecemeal thing (using a projector from the youth and one from the children). got all the things in place and just minutes before worship needed to start all things clicked and we got our images.. "there was much rejoicing"
for those not familiar, opensong is an open source song show software. it is pretty basic, not as flashy as the pro products, but it is free and easy to use. i tried to use liveworship, but for some reason it wouldn't take with my macbook. i was hoping to use the split screen option and some of the perks. i like the intuitiveness of the software, really easy to use, just can't get it it to jive with my macbook. maybe one of my new buddies can impart wisdom.
once that stress was done. the rest of worship was just awesome. travis, one of our youth ministers of the church, has taken the praise team to a whole new level of musicianship and still helps them to maintain a posture of worship. it is the first time in my tenure that the youth have served in all three services in this capacity. the music was all contemporary, with one hymn exception. not all our normal stuff but due to the theme from the scripture for the day, we had to find elements that kept continuity.
our work payed off as people seemed to really get the message with the worship. many compliments from the parishioners which is always affirming. packed up and onto our newcomer luncheon where we did some introduction stuff and other odd things. jetted home to get a little of a nap, not enough of a nap. then back to church for youth gathering. we had planned for our fall bonfire, but with the massive rain over the few days this week our bonfire area washed out and we couldn't get it set up for today. so, we put on a video loop bonfire and cooked our normal food then spent an evening of sardines. sardines means our leadership gets a little break from discussion and small group responsibilities. the only requirement, walk around in the dark, scare a few kids, and act like you are trying to find the hiding kids.