Just finished with our Maundy Thursday service. Here are a few highlights I wanted to share with you:
- 5 minutes before the service, realizing that our secretery typed in a completely different 2nd verse for Come Thou Fount (I have always sung the verse with “Here I raise my Ebenezer” and she completely left it out. Hmph. So while I was supposed to be playing the meditation prelude on my guitar, I’m printing out a new version of the song to hand out to people in the congregation, about 35 who were there).
- As my pastor is welcoming people to the service, and we are preparing to enter into a time of worship, we hear the ice cream truck drive by the church…a few times…yah.
- In the middle of the 2nd verse of Holy, Holy, Holy I look up to see Dot, an older woman in the congregation motioning me to speed up the song, like she was a choir conductor. She is *totally* not the type to do this, so I was totally thrown off. I was going to just vamp on a few chords between the 2nd and 3rd verses and then speed up, but when I stopped, the congregation didn’t, and just kept on going.
- At the end of Amazing Love (You Are My King), I decide to repeat the last two lines again, substituting “we” for the “I” pronoun to give it a more communal feel to the song. As I repeat the 2nd to last line, I totally go blank on the melody of the line and so just make something up that sounds horrible and end the song at that line.
- Then there is a good friend who has cerebral palsy, and there is *never* a rhetorical question with him. So my pastor asks the question, “And how did Jesus love his disciples?” And John just up and responds, “He loved them by washing their feet. He fed them. He cared for them. He died for them…” He totally stole the four points my pastor was going to talk about. We need more people like that in our congregations. There should be no rhetorical questions asked by pastors in our congregations.
The youth are leading the Good Friday service tomorrow night. We’ll see if we have any similar bloopers.