July 5th (Day 52)

Today's verse is Ephesians 4:32, "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you." This is really a tough verse for me to put into practice, especially today which is sad. Today was a pretty rough day. I got up and got to church and started to set up everything. We were done WELL ahead of our previous fastest setup time. However that was one of the few bright spots of the morning. Once again I had created click track, iWorship videos for the entire worship set and we were going to use them. The first song went over well, as far as I knew. However during many of the sets, one of the theater workers turned on the theater projector and started projecting the pre-movie announcements that play before movies, overtop of our worship slides. From there, aside from the sermon, it was pretty much a downhill nightmare. I totally blew it with the next worship song, which ruined the final two songs. Last week I had to make a version of "Strong Tower" with an extra two measure intro, because Shannon was leading and needed to get a feel for the key in contrast to the song before. I totally forgot about it until we were starting the song, and no one else in the theater knew except for me of what disaster had just started. Dave came in exactly where he was supposed to, however there were no lyrics because they were still set on the extended intro version. The Micah changed from the video to regular Mediashout for the remainder of the song. Tyler Carpenter (the drummer) thought that his battery pack on the in-ear had gone out because the click had stopped (however it was because the video was stopped). Because of that, he took his headphones out and tried "fixing" his pack when Micah started the next song's click. Tyler ended up starting a few measures late, so that video was a failure. Tyler finally just scrapped the click and started the final song on his own. I was pretty upset with myself fort he rest of the service/day. On top of that, my O.C.D.-ness pretty much killed me. I could hear mistakes in what I was playing, Ben was playing, and what Jeff was playing. You could say that on-top of the stress that I had to that point, this other stress didn't help. After service Andrew, Tyler, and I went to Red Robin for lunch. After that Tyler and I came back to my house and we watched a movie and then took a nap. I ended up waking up with a stabbing-like, sharp pain going down my left forearm. While sleeping I had been jerking a few times and shaking and then finally just woke up with the pain. I don't know if I've been sleeping on it wrong or what, but it was not very pleasant. Later this evening Dave, Tyler, and I got stuff from Giant Eagle (the grocery store up here) and made a huge meal. We had hamburgers, bratwurst, corn on the cob, and some flavored rice. For desert we had an M&M cookie ice cream sandwich and a miniature frozen snickers bar. The three of us went downstairs after dinner and watched the movie "300" because Dave had never seen it before. During the movie, I got a GREATLY appreciated and welcomed phone call from Ariel Hanna (one of my best friends from KCU), and we chatted for about 45 min before she had to go back to work. The ending to the day has been A LOT better than its beginning. Hopefully this week will go by with a breeze and won't be anymore hectic/stressful for me. I'm hoping also that I can work re-implementing this verse into my life and be more patient and kind towards people like I used to be, even when I'm totally stressed out. This will be a huge asset in the ministry, I already know, haha. Well I guess that's all I have for you today! 25 more days left before I'm done with my internship! Until tomorrow!

Pat