I’m preparing to do a big thing…to step WAY out of my comfort zone. So far out of my comfort zone that I have put off taking this step for many months despite the urging and support of many people and the relentless whispering of the Lord in my ear that this is what I need to do.
I’m applying to join my church’s worship team.
Yep, you read that correctly–I am applying to stand up in front of a crowd of people, both in person and virtually through online services, to share a gift that I really did not know I possessed until people around me told me so. Sounds just like what every introvert would love to do, right?
Music has been a part of my life as far back as I can remember. Whether it is playing an instrument, which I started doing at age seven, or having it on in the background, music is an ever present force in my life. I am known to spontaneously burst out in song, just ask my husband, children and clinic staff. For me there is no life without music.
While most people who know me well enough would expect that an instrument would be involved in this “big thing” it is not. At least not right now. Singing–that is what I feel the call to do. That is why it is such a big step. My voice is something I’ve typically reserved for the shower. And for hiding amongst the multitude of voices at church. The key word there is “hiding”. There is something about worship music that fills my heart and my soul, bringing out from deep within me a voice that I did not realize I possessed. At first I was ignorant of this. One by one over the course of many months people approached me both at church as elsewhere–they had been sitting near me in church and loved hearing me sing. They asked why I wasn’t up on stage. “Really? Are you sure about that?” was my response initially. But then I began to hear the murmuring in my heart, a murmuring that could only come from the Lord: you are meant to sing my praises. As as any good Christian would do I shoved this thought aside for several months with the argument “Lord, I could never do that!” Oh how silly and short sighted we humans are.
The Lord is persistent though, even when we do not feel as if we are well equipped to do His work He finds new ways to tell us otherwise. More congregation members approached me, even messaged me, about hearing me singing at church. After awhile I relented to the Lord’s calling and nervously put my name into consideration for joining the worship team. That was in the Spring. It is now Fall.
Little did I know there was an application. An application that just gave me more reason to procrastinate and ignore the Lord again. But as I said, He’s persistent. I finally received the application in June and let it “marinade” in my inbox. It sat in my email inbox for three months before a friend took up the cause and urged me to complete the process. I got halfway through the process the first time I sat down to work on it but then got a good case of writer’s block. Yay! Another excuse to procrastinate. That was a few days ago. Then today, just as I am debating whether I should finish the process or use my Sunday afternoon following other pursuits my phone dinged with a text from the worship team leader…asking about my application. My game was up, and the Lord’s persistent paid off. I finished the application.
“What was so difficult about it” you may ask. Well–the application required me to put my testimony in writing. Easier said that done. Each week on his podcast “The Matthew West Show” contemporary Christian music artist Matthew West asks his guest about their “Blue Couch Moment”–the moment when they gave their life to Jesus. His [Matthew West] was while watching a Billy Graham Crusade at age 13. Most guests have a moment they can pinpoint in their life when they made the decision. I have no such moment. As you’ll read later on, my call to Christ was a marathon, not a sprint.
Now that it is done, now that I’ve put more of my story into writing I feel the call to share it here. Not for some hope of self-glorification but rather to continue my quest to share my reality with those around me. My quest to help others see that we all struggle, that we all have our imperfections. We all try to ignore God at some point (or many points) in our lives. But as we struggle His voice is calling to us, calling us pursue Him rather than what the world has to offer. The Lord is persistent. Oh is He persistent! As I paused to reflect during my writing I can recall so many points in my life where He was calling me, but I chose to ignore Him. But He doesn’t give up! No one is too lost, too stubborn, to persistent in their procrastination for Jesus to give up on calling us to Him. You have the choice: will you continue to drown out His still, small voice with the noise of the world or will you realize the futility in fighting and finally listen?
May the words of my mouth
and the meditations of my heart
be pleasing to you,
O Lord, my rock and my redeemer
Psalm 19:14
Almira Community Church
APPLICATION FOR WORSHIP TEAM PARTICIPATION
3. With the remaining space on this page, please briefly (but not too briefly) share your personal testimony of your salvation. There is nothing more important in life than our experience of being born again to new life. (If you need more space, feel free to attach a separate sheet.)
There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the creator, made known through Jesus Christ.
Blaise Pascal
God-shaped vacuum…God-Shaped hole…in a way they are both the same. Both are a space devoid of matter, a space that cries by its nature to be filled. Many have, and will, debate the truth of this concept of each person having a place in their heart for God and our Savior. For me no debate necessary: I know personally it is true.
In me that place of emptiness existed—it made itself known as a faceless yearning in my heart that emerged in my teens. I knew the feeling of this emptiness, but I did not know how to fill it.
Would it be filled by material things, having the clothes and shoes that were popular among my classmates?
Would it be filled by achievement, working endlessly to attain the perfect grades that set me apart from others around me?
Would it be filled by accolades, the scholarships and awards attained by my activities?
Would it be filled by controlling my life, by self-denial and self-discipline to (attempt to) rein in the chaos that swirled around me?
I spent these formative years searching but not finding. I felt lost. I felt misled. At several points I wondered if life was even worth living.
In my early twenties I began to feel the pull of church…a call to return that, in all reality, was a call to attend anew. I had been raised Lutheran but in name alone–I attended church intermittently through my early childhood but had never REALLY heard the Gospel. I knew about God and Jesus but only superficially. I had no idea what committing a life to Jesus looked like nor of its freedoms and benefits. During those earlier years in my life church equaled religion, not relation.
My heart was telling me church held something of importance that I was missing…but exactly why it was so I did not understand. I felt the feverish need to answer this call in my early teens, urging my mother to present me for first communion despite not being a regular attendee or going through the class that would typically be required. I knew that church and God were something that had a place in my life but at that point I had only seen it as a motion that must be gone through to live a “good life”. There was no connection in my mind between my absence in God’s community and the emptiness in my life.
I continued this spiritual wandering for almost a decade, continuing to search relentlessly for the matter to fill my void. Then, through conversations with a vet school classmate, I began to hear a distant rumble, an increasingly fervent call to enter the doors of the church again, to open my heart to His word, and to begin the journey to a new life.
Even though the journey had begun, and truth began to fill that empty place in my being, I still wandered. I still battled my personal afflictions that kept me shackled to my old self. I remained confused by the religion of my youth and the spiritual connection that I was now being taught. I learned that I had grown up in what I now know as a works-based mindset and this new concept of grace was chipping away, albeit slowly, at the stone that guarded that empty space in my heart. I attended church faithfully but still felt the nagging feeling that I was missing something.
Spiritually I tripped, I stumbled, I even fell flat on my face numerous times as the years progressed. A revolution of sorts started within my heart at a turning point in my life: when my husband and I moved back to the family farm, and we joined the congregation at his home church—the church where his family had experienced a spiritual revolution decades before and where he had been baptized. Some people can point to a pivotal moment in their life where they asked Jesus into their heart and were born anew. For me, the transformation has been a marathon of sorts, not a sprint to the end. As I began experiencing true community in Christ and learning the divergence of religion and spirituality the stone around my God-shaped hole began to crumble and that vacuum began to fill with love and healing. Healing that is an ongoing process; healing that could only come from a generous and loving God who had been calling to me all along but that my stubborn, sinful human heart had been unable to hear over the din of the world around me. As I look back, each step of the way has had God’s fingerprints all over it as he has been guiding me to this place in the here and now.
As is common in the Lutheran church, my parents had me baptized as an infant. As my spiritual transformation progressed the pull on my heart took me in the direction of making my new commitment to Christ public. In July 2017 I did just this by being baptized again. But my journey is not over…it is far from it. While I am a new creation in the Lord, He is not done with me yet. Each day I find new aspects of my life in which the Lord is still working, new ways in which he is calling me to Him and to His Word.
The Gravel Road Diaries 