Toothpicks and tissue paper

Or, I could post on something else entirely...told you I had a lot of ideas bouncing around up there.

So. Our church does not have its own building. We are (as of this summer) a completely mobile church. We hold our Sunday worship service in a middle school auditorium, with all the pros and cons that entails. (Pros - we *have* a place to worship, it has seats and a stage and a large parking lot......Cons - the seats are bolted to the floor, the stage is the only place for the band to set up, and we are no longer allowed to store all our equipment, and so rely on an ancient truck to move it all every weekend)

All that to say - here is what our stage design crew did this weekend.
(Note, I'm terrible at links, so look for the post titled "The reality behind the scenes")

Anyway - the basic idea was that there would be a giant red heart on the back stage curtain, and during just the right moment of one of the worship songs, the curtain would open to reveal a white chiffon cross draped on the back wall (strategically lit). Well, we spent a good part of the previous Friday evening pinning the heart together out of (guess what?) hula hoops, pool noodles, and fabric - don't laugh too hard, it worked didn't it? Then we spent the next entire Friday evening sorting, measuring, and rolling all our cloth onto bolts for easy reference for upcoming worship designs. Late to bed and up early Saturday morning to set everything up on the stage - hang the white chiffon from the back wall, get the red heart pinned to the curtain, find and set up the lights that were to shine on the chiffon cross. (And figure out how to work gaffer clips, and not poke our fingers with safety pins.)

Well, somewhere in the middle of all *this* madness, we learned that both the truck and the stage crew were locked into the compound where the truck is parked. Seems that a solar powered code box was malfunctioning and kept re-setting the passcode because of it being an overcast day. And while we were waiting for that to be sorted out, the producer informs us that the MediaShout program has crashed and the the tech team will be loading the screen elements (song lyrics and such) manually.

Oh, and about 50 people (many of them leaders) from our congregation were at a retreat that weekend.

So....with the band wondering when their equipment would arrive and all of our nerves fraying we managed to finally finish our setup.

Sunday morning - we arrive at 7:30 AM to learn that more chaos has ensued. The band is having equipment problems due to a shortened setup time, the tech guy who was supposed to help up with our lights hadn't shown up yet (turned out his alarm clock didn't go off), the pastor told us he was going to have to preach on a wing and a prayer - he'd been at the retreat for part of the weekend. The time he'd allotted for prep time was spent nursing his bride (they've been married 12 weeks) through a horrid flu.

All that to say this..... it is obvious to anyone, humanly speaking - we were woefully unprepared. But this leadership team is a group of powerful prayer warriors. We prayed before our pre-service, and prayed during it for the main service. And during that prayer, our pastor reminded us that even if the computer shut down, the lights went off, the band's instruments wouldn't play and the worship leader had to stand on stage leading worship with a flashlight in her hand - God would still show up, and we would still worship Him.

And we knew it to be true.

While I was praying during worship, that those who came would be touched by the Holy Spirit, God spoke to my heart....toothpicks and tissue paper.

"What? God, was that you? What?"

Basically God reminded me that everything we create, for worship or otherwise, it's all toothpicks and tissue paper if He's not in it. Everything, every work of our frail human hands, is toothpicks and tissue paper compared to what God has done.

Wow.

Incidentally, it was one of the most Spirit-led worship services we've ever had....funny how God works sometimes.