I wrestled in an earlier post with issues of time and busyness. I’m still wrestling with it. I think I’m making progress this time… maybe. Becky and I have talked about things quite a lot. She’s supportive (no suprise there) of my desires to get the schedule cleaned off and getting my time priorities changed, and she’ll help keep reminding me so that I don’t just forget about it after a while and drift back to the same old way of doing things.

My “ideal situation” right now is still what I mentioned before: I’d like to just dump everything church-related for a while and see how my schedule settles out. Then I could slowly put it back together the right way, and see how much time I have to do church-related things.

Let me reiterate here that I’m not trying to get out of church responsibilities; I just need to act on what I’ve recognized: that the church can make do without me for a while, but my family can’t.

I don’t think my “ideal situation” is going to happen - it’s just not fair to everybody at church. I think there’d be too many hard feelings and misunderstandings to make it comfortable to continue attending if I just totally dropped my responsibilities there. So I need to find a tolerable compromise. One has suggested itself here recently that just might work.

  1. Turn all my responsibilities for video and sound over to someone else. I don’t know why I even had them in the first place, other than that they loosely relate to the music aspect of the Sunday service. We need to find somebody else to be responsible for making sure the overheads with song lyrics are ready, and that someone is available to run them. It’s a stress that I don’t need on Sunday morning. My fear is that we won’t be able to find someone with a level of responsibility high enough to actually ensure that it gets done correctly.
  2. Drop my elder apprenticing role for now. While my gifting and desire is still to be an elder and to participate in church leadership, I’m appreciating more and more the counsel my dad gave me this summer: that while there is no real age restriction on eldership, there is a “season of life” where your time is needed elsewhere. Family responsibilities have to come first.
  3. Spread out the worship team leadership load. Right now I’m responsible for planning the service every week, then leading the practice and then both Sunday morning services. Every week. We have two teams of musicians/singers, but only one leader. I’ve taken maybe 3 weeks off in the past year. That’s just not enough. What I’d like to do is find someone willing to take leadership of one of the two worship teams. That way I’d only be responsible for planning and leading every-other week. I think that would be do-able.

I’ve put these plans of abdication on hold for a week or two since I promised my pastor (who is also a good friend and has really been my mentor for the past several years) that I wouldn’t make a decision without discussing it with him again, and he’s on a well-deserved vacation to Florida until the end of this week. We discussed it on the phone back before he left; he expressed his desire to talk it over so he could give me some “objective” advice. I laughed out loud. I hope I didn’t offend him. Good advice he will have in abundance. Objective? Not for a minute. He has a stake in this as well; if I dropped everything musically at the church it would have a big impact on Sunday worship services. I know it sounds conceited, but, sadly, it’s true.

What I need to hear him say is this: “I don’t want you to leave things totally. I think there are ways you can reduce your responsibilities without dropping everything. But, if you think it’s what God is calling you to do, then I will support you on that.” I think I will hear it, but I haven’t heard it yet.

I will be continuing to pray for God’s leading in this area. I need wisdom. And Lord, if You want to just send a couple good worship leaders to Noelridge, that would be fine with me, too. :-)