applause

Yesterday I led the worship team and preached. It was a challenging day. All of the kids were with us in worship because it was a 5th Sunday. It was good to have the kids witness the commissioning of someone to go on a mission trip. But I felt the need to inject extra energy into the sermon to keep everyone’s attention. And the sermon went long because we had a skit and object lesson for the kids in the middle of it. On top of that, I felt that I was rushing and there were several things I had planned to say that I had to skip over. And the worship went 10 minutes over even though I had planned on leading only 4 songs, 3 with drums and bass and one solo (just guitar). I had experimented with the first two songs, trying to lead from the electric guitar, but the settings I had tried at home didn’t sound right in the sanctuary and I couldn’t get a sound I liked in the short warm-up rehearsal. I didn’t have much time to think about it after worship because I led an orientation meeting for the hosts and worship leaders for our neighborhood Good Friday services. And then my family went to lunch with some friends who were visiting the Bay Area from SoCal.

I didn’t get to catch my breath until the drive up to Leland House, the residence in San Francisco for people with HIV that we visit each month. I thought about what passage to cover for Bible study. The first Bible study I’d led 2 months ago had 4 participants from the house, the second had just one. I didn’t know what to expect. I got there and found several people sitting outside enjoying the beautiful day on the patio. I sat down, got into the conversation, and then asked if we could have the Bible study out on the patio. I tried to pass out Bibles but no one wanted to read, they just wanted to hear me read to them. I read the parable of the soils from Mark 4 and six of us plus a couple more visitors got into a spirited discussion that ranged from the passage at hand to the truth that is in all religions. (This was NOT an inductive Bible study.) I tried to slip in “nuggets” of evangelistic truth, but found that propositional truth seemed dry. People wanted to talk about what made them able to get up in the morning. They shared about the importance of having gratitude for each day and finding the good in people around them. They had no argument with the fact that God loved them and that sin had messed up the world. They could accept that Christ had said he was the way, but they found it unreasonable that Christians demanded that everyone live a particular way. Right and wrong were self-evident and there was no need to claim ethics as the province of just one religion.

I was an hour late because of my lunch, so the Bible study (that had taken about 15 minutes the previous month) took well over an hour and we didn’t even realize it was already 5:00 and time for dinner. And I hadn’t even touched my guitar, which I usually play for the residents each month. So I decided to play and sing during dinner. I started off tentatively. I hadn’t really thought about it, but the experience of things going badly that morning during the first couple of songs had unnerved me. It took me a few songs to warm up. I noticed one of the residents who had always been appreciative of my music eating by herself, so I started to sing especially for her. After the song was over, she clapped. After the next song one of the guys who’d been part of the Bible study clapped. After the next song he encouraged others to clap. It got to the point where after each song, people would applaud. As people were leaving dinner they said “thank you” to me. I found that I didn’t want to stop playing and singing. Even after everyone had left the dining area I hung around a few moments with not much to do but enjoy the echoes of their thanks.

Several of the songs I’d been singing were worship songs we hadn’t sung in Grace Community’s morning worship for years. But that didn’t matter to the residents. They didn’t know the songs, they just knew that I was sharing my gifts with them, so they were grateful. (We did close with a rousing rendition of “Jesus loves me” that we could all sing together.) It’s easy to become demanding of the best and latest in our worship. As an instrumentalist, I want to try new things and I can become hard on myself and worried about criticism when things don’t sound just right. Yesterday, it took people with HIV, people who knew that being able to get up in the morning is a joy in itself, to help me get back to the heart of worship. “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise.” Psalm 100:4.