The songs I played today went over pretty well - I got a comment about including an old hymn (Shall We Gather at the River). While I like new(er) music, I am not adverse to using older hymns if they fit in the theme; this one absolutely did. I did not get to play "Be Thou My Vision" as the music director started playing it; I guess the part where I got to play it never made it to her. What I thought was really funny is that the music director played a little bit of "Be Thou My Vision" as part of the special music: I thought that the way she played it then was really prayerful. Certainly more prayerful than when she played for the hymn.

I think one of the reasons I was feeling a little overwhelmed last Friday was that I was looking at all that had to be done for Sunday. Of course that semi crisis was self inflicted; I could have started the slides for the church service long before Saturday as I received the material on Monday. Okay, so I was out of town for a couple of days, but I still could have gotten a good part of it, if not all, done before Saturday. After all, if I remember correctly, it really only took a couple of hours to do the slides. So the complaint that working on the slide presentations (singsong and service) is not really valid as they really should be done by then if I do not procrastinate.

However, it does bring up an interesting point. Either my daughters or I have been running the slide presentations during the service. But for the foreseeable future my daughters will be downstairs teaching Sunday school and I will be sitting with the choir. So there is no one left to run the presentation. I guess it is time to delegate that duty to someone else. I also happen to think that the church secretary should be putting the service slides together. But there are a couple of problems with that: the church does not have Microsoft PowerPoint (at least I do not think it does) and I am not really sure that the secretary has enough time to work on the slides considering the limited amount of time she is at the church every week and all the things that needs to be done every week.

Let's see if I can get things started a little earlier this week; after all Monday is a holiday so I have some extra time. The Bible readings this week are:

Matthew 22:1-10; and
1 Corinthians 11:23-34

So I will try to get started on my list of songs for the singsong tomorrow.

God Bless You!