chasing the sun

A train wreck.

There are no other words that can accurately describe what happened yesterday morning.

Normally, our church worship team, of which I am a part, has practice on Thursday evenings. This week, however, practice was not possible, so we simply met an hour before service to run through the songs.

Now, if we were all expert musicians and vocalists, what happened yesterday morning would likely not have happened, though everyone has off-days. But we are not all experts. There are those among us who are really good at what they do and some who even get paid to do what they do because they are so good. Then there are the rest of us who just work really hard and try not to suck.

As we began to practice the first song, I knew something was wrong. If you know how a song ought to sound, you can generally tell when it’s just not right. And the first song wasn’t right. I couldn’t hear the melody, so I didn’t even sing in practice. My hope was that by time for service, whatever was wrong would be righted.

We finished practice and took time to pray together and say hi to people we knew. Then it was time for service. And so we gathered on stage and the music started and the first song was still really wrong.

And I just sang a part that I knew, even though I knew it didn’t blend at all and sounded bad and awful and it wasn’t right, because it was either stand there silently or at least try to make something out of the multi-tonal disaster that was taking place.

I couldn’t help but smile, even though I knew it was terrible. And when we were finished with that song, I think we all breathed a sigh of relief, especially the worship leader. The service went on more smoothly than it had started and it ended without further incident. And besides being told by one person, “That was the worst thing I’ve ever heard at this church…ever!” our blunder went largely unnoticed by the congregation.

Times like that just make me love church. It reminded me that, no matter what happens, we’re in it together. We shine or fall short as a team. And when I can’t find my part, or when I can’t hear well enough to join in, there is some comfort in the fact that everyone else is pretty much struggling with the same thing. This is one of the many reasons I think belonging to a community is so important for us as human beings. When you’re alone, every failure seems so absolute and every success feels sort of hollow. And that identification with a larger group, a huger force, can sustain us in our ridiculousness and give us more opportunities to rejoice, both for ourselves and for others…

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” -- Dorothy Day