Study Break 2011:5

2:44AM and I cannot sleep. Wondering if this is to be the study break with no sleep.

Then I remembered that I sat at Panera for three hours this evening, reading. And drinking coffee.

Well, then. A few bullet points to process my nocturnal brain activity (which is going 100 miles an hour. Thank you, Panera's light roast.)

• I awoke with the opening riff of "Christ Is Risen" echoing in my brain. I wonder how many other churches included Matt Maher's song in their Easter worship set? We did ours with ballet dancers, en pointe. Pretty cool.
• We had a choir as well, although the turnout was less than I expected. We had some great, faithful participants, and they sang well and added a lot to the service. But I've been wrestling for some time now with the thought that I should be investing time into having a choir at our church. For Easter, I set a schedule in advance and offered an opportunity to sign up early. We served as an "additional voice" alongside the worship leaders, which I think is a great way for a choir in a church like ours to function. But turnout was small and there were no men. In the recent still, small moments of the night (as in when I woke up about an hour ago and couldn't get back to sleep), I think perhaps this is a good sign for me to let this worry go. This is an investment that will have to wait for another leader's time.
• It just started to rain. The windows are open, and I can hear the wind and the water surrounding me. In the middle of the night, it feels intimate and private.
• I met Bob Lauflin of West End Assembly of God a few weeks ago at a conference. As long as I knew him, Bob Pino had been encouraging me to connect with his former worship pastor. I wish I had made the time. After listening to Lauflin speak and chatting with him for a few moments, I was intrigued by the thought of doing a major production event (other than Christmas Eve) to invite folks in the community to stretch their artistic wings. Something other than choir to open the door to more than just the weekend experience musical and technical artists. At PCC, what happens on the weekends drives everything else we do. I'm wondering how this possibility might fit in with our vision and purpose. Looking forward to connecting with Mr. Lauflin in the near future for a more detailed conversation....

There are so many seemingly random bullet points in my brain; I wonder how I can hear anything of value? Thoughts of scheduling musicians for the remainder of May and who's on vacation and whether or not we'll have a bass player at both campuses and how I can integrate the new folks and how to juggle drummers and who needs to be singing more frequently and what new songs we should introduce and when can we have another creative team meeting and are we going to paint the back wall for this series and is Elijah going to be back for the summer and where are we going to get a set of stairs for the series after that and where I'll find the budget money to cover all the new licenses we need and why the projector bulb failed so early and where we'll find the budget money to cover that and why does ustream keep choking for the online campus and did I remember to schedule a commissioning service for the missions teams this summer and are we changing rehearsal to Thursdays and did the DVD equipment to finalize our videos get ordered and what to do about the equipment issues for new projection software and why is Dave having such a hard time getting videos uploaded and can we get him new equipment and on and on and on....

and it's no wonder my brain is mush.

I'd really like to go back to sleep.

And I miss Bob Pino, for the record.