So... that was a new experience...

Tonight I led worship at the Oxford Prayer Room. It was my first time leading worship in public (eg with people I don't know in the room). Inspired by another Oxford-based blogger, I'm going to analyse the evening here, warts and all... I probably shouldn't analyse tonight publicly, or with the probably self-critical method I'm going to employ. I almost certainly shouldn't be writing this blog post at half past midnight [Edit: It's now 1.15am...] when I need to be in work early tomorrow. I'm going to ignore both of those suspicions for now. It would make for a boring post if I didn't.

First let me say OW OW OW OW OW OW. It currently hurts using my left fingers to type, and I hope that my left arm won't be too stiff in the morning. I've never played guitar for such an extended period of time before - after about 40 minutes cramp set in and I had to let Claire take over at that point until I could grip the guitar neck again.

I'd asked Claire to help me lead, mostly because I am very aware of the limits of my musicianship and she clearly has an anointing that I simply don't have. I don't say that in a self-deprecating way; but I know that my skills don't primarily lie in playing music or singing (of which, more later). I've never played music with someone else before (well, not anything like this and certainly not for years) and I think that showed. I know the Aldates bands do spend the time practicing with one another, helping them to gel musically. Claire and I hadn't even practiced together before tonight, and things were made more difficult about ten minutes in, when we suffered a Technical Problem.

If you have ever shared a sound desk with me, you'll know that I don't do technical problems. If I have to leap into the power room mid-service and repatch half the system to work around a problem, I will; if I had to kneel on the floor holding a loose cable in place while operating the visuals computer keyboard with my face and the DVD player with my left foot, I would. Probably. It comes with the territory of being an A/V engineer and programmer. But in this new arena, I simply didn't have the tools and skills to deal with the fact that, ten minutes in to what turned out to be a 90-odd minute session, my guitar strap broke.

"That's hardly the end of the world," you've probably just thought to yourself, and you're right. A quick requisition of a chair to sit on and I could carry on just fine; except it made things just that little bit more difficult. Trying to look around at Claire to signal a chorus or a repeat was awkward; she wouldn't have seen the usual leg signals even if I'd had the spare mental capacity to remember to give them. And as for trying to work out what chords she was playing during the times when she improvised was (especially for a non-keys player) impossible. Mostly, Claire was able to follow what I did just fine, but then she has the advantage of knowing both instruments well!

The high probability that anything I played to Claire's lead would be in the wrong key, then, meant I mostly didn't play while she was leading. But what I did try to do is improvise with my voice, rather than the guitar. Now, I don't have a spectacular voice. My parents always tried to discourage me from singing - though in their defence, this was through those teenage years when male voices become difficult tools to wield! Still, it really touched me when, a few weeks ago at church, someone standing next to me told me that I had a wonderful voice and it was so nice to worship next to me. Without that, I probably wouldn't have volunteered to lead tonight, although I'm still not sure I understand all the reasons why I did!

I was quite pleased with how well my voice managed on some of the songs, but - and I think this is a confidence thing - I'm well aware that for probably 40% of the time, I was horribly out of key. Again with the lack of tools thing - how do I fix that mid-song? I noticed a tendency that I had of trying to sing songs an octave lower than I'd practiced, for fear of not hitting the right notes; all that resulted was that I hit the same wrong notes, just an octave lower. When I managed an octave jump for the third verse of David Crowder's "Alleluia, Sing" I was actually really surprised with how my voice sounded - to me, at least, much better than the lower first two verses.

I also liked being able to use the prayer room in worship. There's a wall in the room on which people have written the names of people they know and prayers that they would come to know Jesus. As part of the worship I read out each of the names that were up there, asking God to break in to their lives. I don't know any of them (save one), but God does. I hope that that prayer can be used in some way.

Much like this post, the session went on a little longer than I'd expected. I'd only really prepared enough for the 40 minutes my wrist lasted before cramp set in, but Claire and I were there for another 45 minutes on top of that. (While my memory for song lyrics is necessarily quite extensive, the same is not true of their chords!) I am truly grateful that Claire was there. She certainly helped me to enter into God's presence this evening - and after all, that's what worship is about. Not that we can make our own ways into the presence of God, but that Jesus has made it possible at all, and somehow we can commune with God as we sing and pray. It becomes not about the singing, the praying, the words, the chords, the visuals or the sound mix; it becomes about Jesus, and Jesus alone.

So Jesus, take those songs and prayers; you deserve so much more than the little I was able to give, but every beautiful chord and every bum note are yours.