Before I begin by recapping what a horrible mistake I made before hitting church Wednesday night, I should point out that the praise & worship was awesome ... as was Marcos' message. My plan, going in, was to leave work early, return a DVD, grab a bite to eat, still arrive at church early enough to just sink into a good seat and catch up on some reading. All that was supposed to build up into a nice crescendo of enjoying the heck out of Wednesday night at Lakewood.

A minor mistake leading into all this was that my ideal of leaving the office at 5:30 became the reality of leaving at 6:00. Fine, not the end of the world. I can just inhale a meal and everything will be good enough. That part, I managed to do just fine. But in the process of doing so, I click the MP3 player to a sermon I'd meant to listen to the night before. It would seem that I'm always trying to catch up on something.

That brings me to my bigger mistake ... the sermon was one of those rare highlight kinda sermons that just sticks with you in a lot of different ways and starts to mess with your mind in the best of ways. I'm sure I've now beaten my MP3 player to a pulp by jamming the rewind button down for minutes at a time to give something a second listen.

Why is this such a bad thing, you may be asking? Well, all this meant that I arrived at church, book waiting to be read ... and all I can do is just dare not to crack it open. I tried forcing myself to do so. But almost immediately, I put it down and read through the Bible passages from the sermon. Technically, it was just a quick read through Jonah. Short book of the Bible. Not enough time marked off in the process.

Don't get me wrong, now ... there are fewer things I love doing at Lakewood than just listening to the final rehearsals before service. It's just that I much prefer to do so with a book in hand and nose somewhat buried in it as I listen. So it wasn't any kind of waste. Just more the case that I'm awful at sitting still. Dreadedly awful. I pace at the bus stop. I pace around the (small) office when I need to get away from my PC. I never leave home without something to read for fear of finding myself with nothing to do. I'm assuming this makes me part shark in that I always have this need to keep moving ... mentally, if not physically. But usually some odd combination of both.

So for the better part of a solid 30 minutes, I just sat there. To me, that's just painful.

The fortunate side of this is that praise & worship was still awe-inspiring. Greg Boyd's sermons on worship have been great in re-instilling an appreciation of this. So maybe all wasn't lost. Or, for that matter ... maybe nothing was lost at all. There's something to be said for just sitting still and soaking up the lesson from a good sermon, just that I'm used to doing that late at night. Often, right before heading to bed for the night.

I'll save a recap of the sermon in question for later, but for anyone interested in a listen, it's Joel Hunter's "A Whale of an Attitude."

For now, there's one minor highlight I'd like to echo from the service we had. Since I usually take a moment to point my little bitty flashlight that I think is a spotlight on some singer with a beautiful voice, a choir full of great singers, or musicians with a load of talent and a lot of great spirit ... the thought occurred that I rarely have an opportunity to highlight our main drummer, Jonathan Camey. Just a brief clip in here of him at about the 4:00 mark. But it's shot very well (yay camera team!) and just shows off Jonathan very well. I'm told that both he and brother Joel are extremely (multi-)talented musicians and great guys. This only has about 10 seconds or so to witness a bit of that, but barring a drum solo at a Lakewood service, I'll take what I can get.

Enjoy ...