December 24th, 2006

The Fourth Sunday in Advent and the morning worship brings amazing gifts of music. The tone of the service was changed from our usual worship custom. We did not start with Creator Praise.

Before her performance Rebekah joked about coughing out Michael W. Smith's All Is Well. It turned out to be a musical highlight of morning worship. Matt's piano accompaniment highlighted her vocal and I helped on guitar.

There was a service heavy with music. There were comments on how strong the music was afterwards. Worship music can be a strange balancing act of trying to stay in the moment while anticipating the next piece of music that is coming up.

There are interesting things that happen. During the opening hymn the musicians had different lyrics than the congregation. There were many words using Christmas pieces of music. When the music is on one page and and the words to sing on another the prayer can simply be that it all comes together without tripping up.

I wouldn't normally talk about this personal a view on worship but there is some encapsulation of Christmas as a whole in this. There are more demands, and hopes everything comes out better than usual while simultaneously there is normally there is less time to prepare because of all the other preparations happening at the same time.

Well, time to prepare for the Christmas Eve services.