Not on my own Strength

I did not awake this morning when my alarm clock went off, but rather over an hour later. Realizing I would miss class, I rolled back over and slept. I awoke feeling fully refreshed even though I had slept less than six hours. I went to the post office to pickup a package and while walking back I called Dryas. It turns out he was at the hospital with his wife’s grandmother who had a lung embolism. The purpose of the call turned out just to be so I knew to pray for her.

It had been my intention since before spring break to use a different media software (MediaShout) at Real Life’s CityWide, starting today. Having worked with software and live production before (and therefore knowing things always take longer than expected), I made arrangements to access the computer earlier than usual. This way I’d have time to download and install the software, tinker with it a bit as necessary and then prepare the evening’s presentation.

The installation process hit a few snags, but upon overcoming those I was able to put the PowerPoint presentations into the evening’s cue stack. Timing was such that it made sense to wait until arriving on-site to do song lyrics. In theory, MediaShout has a large lyrics database and all I’d have to do is click the song and drag it to a cue. After arriving at CityWide, Craig, who normally does the lyrics discovered that the songs we needed lyrics for were not in the MediaShout library. Nor could MediaShout import from OpenSong, our previous lyric projection software. And adding a new song from scratch wasn’t working well.

At this point I was handed the Passion of the Christ DVD to play a snippet from. Fortunately with MediaShout I can insert a DVD cue with the start and stop times marked; it’ll do the rest. Except when “Key exchange for DVD copy protection failed.” Crunch time. I left lyrics to OpenSong; Craig set up a presentation while I had a bite to eat. I then spent half an hour trying to fix the DVD problem. To no avail I loaded Media Player Classic and cued the DVD to the proper timing as the show started.

Worship went well, though since I was running equipment and stressing about the projections (and had been for a few hours), I couldn’t really worship like I would want to. Alalcomeneus said to me as we started worship and I was stressing, “Give it to God.” Oh yeah, I should do that. So I did; the projections didn’t go too poorly, but certainly worse than I intended. That was my problem—it was what I intended. I had been planning for weeks that I could put in this new software and that I could tie everything together for a smoother presentation. I hadn’t given it to God and I tried to do it on my own strength. God humbled me.