This Week's Sneak Peek

Somewhat of a mess-up at the church where I'm the musician yesterday. 

Our pastor was on vacation, and the guest pastor wanted to change the Hymn of the Day from what I had originally picked, to go along with an alternate Gospel reading he wanted to preach on. So I had replaced in the overhead projection PowerPoint the hymn I had chosen with the one the guest preacher wanted.

Or so I thought. I had mistaken the hymn he wanted with a hymn the congregation knows well. The hymn he wanted was one the congregation has never sung. And in spite of being in 4/4 time, there is an inexplicable 3/4 measure second from the end of each verse, guaranteed to trip everybody up. Including the lead musician.

Saturday night, my husband and I came home from a family gathering to find a message from the president of the congregation on our land line phone. The guest pastor had come down ill, and there was no second-string guest pastor to fill in.

Then, when I came in on Sunday morning, the computer that runs the PowerPoint wanted to spend half an hour installing an update to the operating system, leaving me very little time to adjust the PowerPoint to match what we worship leaders decided upon. Furthermore, I had forgotten my glasses at home, so I couldn't read what was on the PowerPoint slides as I attempted to move them around.

What's more, the title of the guest pastor's choice of hymn was in the bulletin, but over the score of the hymn I had originally chosen. I had no slides for my choice of the hymn, but I decided that it was better to have the congregation sing the hymn they know rather than the one they didn't. Besides, I couldn't lead the singing if I couldn't read the words.

Meanwhile, the tech guys were having problems getting the live feed to Facebook — a mix-up copying a key code, then the signal deciding to buffer during the service — but at least that was not up to me to worry about.

And to top things off, midway through the service, I noticed that the Sending Song in the bulletin was not the one I had chosen for this week; it was the one I'd chosen for the service two weeks earlier. Oh, well: it was too late to get that hymn into the PowerPoint. We sang the hymn in the bulletin, and I'm sure nobody was the wiser.

(Psst — don't tell them!)