I was told several years ago that you should live for the average days. If you wake up everyday expecting to have a mountain top experience than you will spend much of your life disappointed. We just don’t live on top of a mountain. And even if you did you would still have to come down from time to time.

You could describe the past couple of weeks at Lifepoint as mountain top experiences. Gearing up for our fall kickoff, gas giveaway, and the launch of our 2nd service brought a certain energy and excitement. Well as you can guess we had to come down the mountain at some point. This past week was our treck down. Not in a bad way but in a humorous way. What I am about to write is not out of frustration or discouragement but out of authenticity and the ability to laugh at ourselves. This is the story of this past Sunday.
Where do I start???

I guess you could say that the day got off to a rocky start when our creative director Brad managed to bend one of the pins in our brand new $30 S-video cables just after I said, “hey Brad, don’t force that cable they can break easily.” No biggie. From there we found ourselves laughing internally as Brad got up to do his welcome while “over my head” by the Fray played softly in the background. It was nice mood music. Sorry for throwing you off Brad.

We experienced a barrage of technical difficulties throughout our service as well. During Brad’s welcome and greeting he was setting up the stage for us to play a video from a local news station about our Gas Giveaway. For several moments we sat listening to dead silence and watching the screen shift back and forth between brad’s background which appears to have some kind of shrunken head on it and the video we were attempting to play.

Following the video we decided to try something completely new. We thought it would be cool to take a short intermission and allow people to greet fellow Lifepointers. I highly recommend doing this if you ever want to drain any momentum out of your service. It would be similar to driving with three flat tires.

You could say that we were off to a good start. The best moment of all happened when I got up to speak. To illustrate this weeks message I had the stage design team reconstruct the stage in what I refer to as the “finger” layout which would form a runway for me to walk out into the crowd. This was a really neat concept until we turned the lights on and literally blinded the entire crowd. Not too bad. That is until about three minutes into my talk when I noticed a woman to my left shuffling through her purse and putting on her SUNGLASSES. People were squinting and holding their hands over their eyes to block the light. It was a disaster.

Then there’s the video…We played a special video this weekend of my Dad sharing the story of my parents marriage. It was a powerful video and one that will forever remain in the annals of Lifepoint history. I hope the message rang out louder than the 28 changes from black and white to letterbox, to normal and so on. I have been asked to never, ever, ever, ever edit another video again. I accept.

I think at one point Daryl was looking for a hard lemonade while Brad was whipping up some jello shooters in the back. Just Kidding.
Thankfully when you do two services you have a brief window of opportunity to correct and smooth over any rough edges before the next crowd comes in. Our team is awesome. They made some adjustments and the second service went off without a hitch.

What comes to mind is a few verses tucked away in 2 Corinthians that says, “‘My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.’ So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me. That’s why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

We were extra strong this past weekend. In case anyone was wondering, yes, we are normal and yes we have bad days. The good news is just as you don’t live on top of the mountain, you don’t live in the valley either.

Huge props to our band. You guys absolutely rocked this past weekend. I would come back just to hear you guys again.

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