Not Your Ordinary Sunday

Church was good in every way today, with about thirty-five exceptions. Well, OK, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but we had so many difficulties today that it was funny! Allow me to explain. The first disaster came about in the congregational music, for which I was responsible. Someone had requested that I do All in All for one of the songs, and I rather ambitiously decided to do it as a round. I divided it up into parts and put it on powerpoint, and had Daddy and Ryan lead. Unfortunately, we didn't have much time to practice, and the song kind of fell apart. Nevertheless, it was hardly much better than I had expected.

Next we did the song Saved, Saved! which went almost without a hitch (I made a small mistake in the second chorus). The third and final song that we put together was Thank You, Lord which went fine on my part; however, after the second of the three verses, Daddy's laptop decided it was tired of changing slides and refused to respond to any keys at all, with the exception of the Ctrl-Alt-Del combination. I was slightly startled when I started the third verse and nobody sang. I have counted the verses wrong once or twice before and either stopped or continued at the wrong times, so I just kind of finished the verse off right in the middle. I felt rather embarassed until someone explained that the slide hadn't changed. We skipped the last verse and finished off with a final chorus, and I was all done with the leading. Whew!

The service was then turned over to a lady from Bedford named Meme Stephens, who shared a number of songs she had written and recently had put on CD. She sang a couple songs with guitar, and then started to sing one with a track from her new CD. About halfway through the song, the CD stopped. Just plain stopped. We could find no explanation for why it stopped, but it did. She played it with her guitar instead, but the sound wasn't working very well, once again without explanation. The volume was coming across very quiet, but every time the volume was turned up, the sound was distorted. The crowning touch came immediately after the congregation watched a DVD put out by the Christian organization World Vision. When the five-minute clip finished, Uncle Alden opened the player to take the DVD out--and it slipped down into the machine. After church we got out a screwdriver and took half the sound system apart to get it out.

The last glitch in the service was when the pastor asked for a hymn. I went up to play since Lindsay wasn't there today, and found that the song was one I had sung perhaps once or twice in my life and had certainly never played. It was fairly easy, though, and I managed to make successively fewer mistakes with each verse. Then church was over for the week. The end.


P.s. Happy birthday, Cherilyn and Duncan!

P.p.s. I recently read an article online that began something like, "Police said the murderer escaped from prison last Thursday and began a thorough investigation of his escape as soon as his absence was discovered." Hahaha.

P.p.p.s. I was listening to Sean Hannity as I was about to drive out of a parking lot today, and some ad came on with a loud honking noise that really startled me because I thought someone was honking at ME. Then, on my way out of a gas station getting onto 101, it happened again, and I was just as startled and not a little annoyed. Grrrr. (Sean Hannity was great, though!)