God’s Modus Operandi
Being sick for Easter isn’t the most ideal situation for the worship leader. Having a baby on Good Friday is also not the most ideal situation for a worship leader. I’ve now experienced both! Last year, our firstborn came into the world on Good Friday. Easter was a little challenging, but we got through it. This year, I experienced a whole new dilemma.
A lot of churches did many services for Easter this year. We decided to do one giant Good Friday service and one giant Easter service at the same venue (James L. Knight Center in downtown Miami). We loaded in early Good Friday morning. I had gotten around three hours of sleep (which I highly discourage any worship leader or vocalist to do). We were there all day setting up, checking monitors, rehearsing for Easter and rehearsing for Good Friday. Some time after lunch is when it hit me.
My stomach started reeling. It felt like someone was smashing it in a vice grip. The closer it got to our Good Friday service the worse the pain got. Tums, nothing. Sprite, nothing. Pepto, nothing. A few of the pastors prayed over me before I went up. We played about six songs before a pastor came out and welcomed the crowd. I was telling myself, “I can still do the offering song. No biggie. Just suck it up and get through it.” But suddenly I began thinking of how terrible it would be to vomit all over the stage. Talk about a distraction! I told myself, “I would rather walk off the stage now than try to be a hero and create a spectacle in front of the whole church,” so off I went. It was the right choice! (Shout out to Alex, Tito and John for being amazing friends).
I went home that night never to go to sleep. I was up sick the whole night. What made it worse was my wife got the same exact thing at the same exact time. Bad stuff. Fortunately, it was a twenty-four hour thing. And fortunately, our one year old didn’t wake up the entire night. And fortunately, the illness was right in between Good Friday and Easter so I was able to rest up and lead Easter morning. And fortunately, the kind of business we’re in doesn’t rely on our success, our strength or our ability. It relies on the power of God. He runs the show, He knows what’s best. He blesses the works of our hands despite what we had for lunch!
Our services that weekend were so spectacular, whatever happened to me was completely diminished in the light of what happened at church. This is something that I’ve come to learn over the past few years. For some crazy reason, God chooses to extend His grace to the point of covering our failures and weaknesses even when we’re doing His work.
Your heart may not be right walking onto that platform, but God will still choose to use that moment for His good. You may be going through something with your family or spouse, but God will still work through you. Because it’s not about us, it’s about His strength being made perfect in our weakness. It’s about us realizing our insufficiency so we can rely on His sufficiency. Because let’s admit it, God is most glorified when He does totally crazy things through total failures like us. He’s most glorified when He does huge things with Gideon’s 300, five loaves and two fish or Jonathan and his armor bearer. That’s just His modus operandi.
“Great tribulation brings out the great strength of God. If you never feel inward conflicts and sinking of soul, you do not know much of the upholding power of God; but if you go down, down, into the depths of soul-anguish till the deep threatens to shut her mouth upon you, and then the Lord rides upon a cherub and does fly, yea, rides upon the wings of the wind and delivers your soul, and catches you away to the third heaven of delight, then you perceive the majesty of divine grace. Oh, there must be the weakness of man, felt, recognised, and mourned over, or else the strength of the Son of God will never be perfected in us.” – Spurgeon
Worship leader? Musician? Church-attender? Share your Easter experience!
