In Charge For Worship

There are several things happening at my contextual site right now, or at least there was as this weekend's worship services were approaching.

A side note, my supervising pastor is gone for a two week block. He, along with about 25 other people, is visiting the Holy Land. I spoke to him last Thursday morning (Thursday afternoon for him) and he was in a hotel on the shores of the Seal of Galilee. I was instantly jealous because its the Sea of Galilee...he's walking in the footprints of Christ himself.

Anyway, with him gone, I'm kinda the go-to guy in terms of a pastoral presence...which is fine, but a little bit different for me. The nice thing is that we had additional help this weekend. I've been working off an on for the past couple months setting up a good friend of mine as a guest musician. James Hersch. He actually hails from the Twin Cities, though I met him in southern Colorado at family camp a few years back. This turned out to be the weekend that he came.

Additionally, we had a guest preacher. A local retired pastor, who had volunteered for the purpose of letting me off the hook of preaching two weeks in a row. Both of these guys are a huge blessing and I was looking forward to them being around.

As of Friday, everything was in line. Then Friday night, something detrimental happened. Winter set it. Just before I went to bed Friday night I looked outside and saw that tell tail sign...whiteness.

At that point, I wasn't too concerned, but when I got up Saturday morning, I was a little more worried. It was still snowing, it was cloudy and windy, though the temperature was hovering a little above zero. I went outside and shoveled my driveway, carefully watching the weather. The weather forecaster didn't help any as he mentioned that the path of the weather went right up to the cities.

As the day went on, I was pleased to find out that he was on his way anyway...braving the weather. Then next hurdle that I hit was going out to the church about 2 in the afternoon and finding that our snow removal plans were not yet finalized and there was wet sloppy snow all over. So I spent an hour scooping the sidewalk and car drop off point. (Is that a normal activity for a pastor?)

All that being said, 5 o'clock rolled around and both of my assistants showed up. Worship went great and I took James to our friends house following worship for supper. They had gone to camp with us this past summer and had gotten to know him as well, and it was a wonderful evening of fellowship.

This morning went great as well. Two worship services and he played a concert between times as well. All in all, things went really well...but worrying about everything for two days wore me out.

Let's just say that my Sunday afternoon nap felt amazing.