Wednesday, May 7, 2008

One Prayer, two sermons...

Yesterday was somewhat of a low key day. I spent much of the day praying for Myanmar and preparing for my One Prayer message. In between that, I did some running around for our upcoming community outreach event called Overflow: Sanford. By the evening I was feeling pretty good about my readiness for the One Prayer recording. That is until I stared into the lens of the camera... then I froze. You see, I love to preach and teach the Scriptures but I hate being aware that there's a camera lens zoomed close-up to my face so that you can see every ridge and furrow (at least that's how I felt).


But I pushed through my misgivings and preached the message of my life, all the while thinking, "There may well be people from all over the world who will listen to this message." The more I thought that, the more inspired I became, and the less conscious of the camera. I hit it out of the park! It was a great message (even if I say so myself). I mean, I was inspiring, profound and motivational... I was on fire... I was... I'm sorry, I was getting carried away for a moment there. You see, everything went perfectly according to plan and when I was done the video guy tells me that I was right on the money as far as time goes. I was ecstatic. Until we had to play it back. Then we discovered that the audio didn't record. It was like watching an old Charlie Chaplin silent movie, all animated gestures and no words.

Nobody wanted to stay for a second taping, so I preached my heart out... for the second time in the space of an hour and a half... to a camera lens and the video guy, who was checking his messages on his blackberry while I preached up a storm. Wow. God really has perfected the art of humbling me as soon as I begin to think it's about me. It was a good recording and I'm pretty confident that the message will be a blessing to some church somewhere in the world during the month of June when we all join together in "One Prayer" for the Church. If it is, it won't be because I hit it out of the ball park, it will be because of God's sovereign grace. So, how was your day yesterday, anything exciting happen? I bet you didn't have to do two services on Tuesday evening.

3 comments:

Hope R. Clark said...

Ooohhh maaannnn!!!

Thea said...

uggghhh...the blackberry would have killed me...

We had a flood in our basement yesterday - it was exciting...just not the kind of exciting I prefer :)

Joseph said...

It's all good. I'm learning more each day about God's sovereignty and grace.

Thea, sorry about the basement though I can't relate, you see, I live in Florida where we don't know what basements are.