Is attention bad?

This morning I was lucky enough to be able to sit down and enjoy some fresh air while I read my book for Union and kinda sipping on a really bad iced coffee. Minus the climbing heat as time passed, it was incredibly enjoyable and relaxing. After sitting there and reading for about 45 minutes (at this point my really bad coffee was dreadful thanks to the melted ice), two ladies sat down at the table next to me. I had overheard one of the ladies thank God for iced coffee on a day like today so of course I chuckled and tried to get back to my reading but then overheard her talking about church on Sunday. I'm not going to lie, my brain was a little fried from the combo of the heat, bad coffee, and lots of heavy reading so my focus turned to them since I am always curious about church experiences. The conversation really got me thinking- she mentioned that she had stood up in church with a few prayer concerns and announcements (nothing out of the norm as far as I am concerned) and that she was sure "the devil was gonna get her for doing it" because you shouldn't call attention to yourself in church, and to top it off, someone publicly thanked her for something she had done for the church.

So here is my question- is it really that bad to make announcements or prayer requests? It is bad to have your name called out in church for something you have done?

I have never really been one to stand up in church until recently when my sister was in the hospital, at which point I was standing up every week asking for prayers. I never once thought that this was bad, but rather a good thing and something that should be done. In addition, I won't lie about the fact that I was a little disapointed when I wasn't recognized by either church I attend when I graduated but others were, or that nothing was ever mentioned when I left church for the last time before seminary and nothing was said by anyone except for one lady who has been very involved in my life. So overhearing this conversation today really hit home for me. Am I a bad person for standing up and asking for prayers for my sister every week or for wanting to recognized for two big events?

Sometimes, I do think that church is not the place for attention and that the focus should really be on God. Then I argue that God has done so much in our lives that it is right to recognize his hand in it, or to recognize that we do need his help. Now, if the focus is removed from God, it is not appropriate. In this lady's case, it sounded like people were thanking her for sharing God's love in a special way and that this SHOULD be done and she should never feel bad about asking for multiple prayers.

Joel 1 says: "The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel: Hear this, you elders; give ear, all inhabitants of the land! Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your fathers? Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children to another generation."

This makes me think that it is OK to spread the word of how God is working in your life, or how you need his hand at work. This is about the locust invasion, but I think that the key part is telling everyone around about the thing that has happened, because there is nothing like it. This goes for all of our lives, not just when we get invaded by a bunch of bugs.

I won't lie... I do kinda like attention. I want to ask for prayers and not feel bad about it, I want to be recognized not for what I have accomplished on my own but for what God has helped me accomplish, and I want to write my blog to share God's word. My life is centered around God, and I don't think that this is such a bad thing the the devil will come get me.

Thoughts??

Trumpet and Faith

This past Sunday I played for the Lenten Cantata at First Baptist Church in Greensboro. Honestly there was nothing to special about this for me since I have played there the fourth Sunday of every month for 20 out of the past 24 months, but I did get thinking about the relation between my music life and my faith life during one of the songs I didn't play on.

Trumpet can be a real beast 99% of the time. One day you can play something great, the next it is terrible (and most of the time it is a minute rather than a day). Well, my control freak comes out when I play even though I know that I really shouldn't. I have a bad habit of freaking out when I am not 100% consistent and I will track everything I play to make sure that it is right (yea, this just makes things worse) rather than just let go and trust that after 15 years of playing, my mind and body know what to do. Well, for the first half of the cantata on Sunday, I tracked and worried and controlled and LOST. I knew what I needed to do, but I didn't do it until I was reminded why I was there. When the preacher invited anyone wanting to become a member to come forward, a young girl in 5th grade came and professed her faith and joined the church, and I was reminded of why I was there.

We can tell ourselves how to do something all day, and we do. How good is that something though if we don't include God? I knew that I was playing for God, but I also had it in my head that I was playing for me. WRONG. My focus needed to be solely on God, the man that gave me my musical gift and who I should be giving it back to. Seeing that young girl reminded and focused me because I couldn't do it myself. That is how it is with our faith sometimes. Even if we know that what we are doing should be for God but we keep doing it for our own glory, we get no where except into a big struggle. As soon as we give everything over to God and remove all focus from ourselves, that is when we will move forward. This is hard to do, just like it is hard to stop thinking about all my technique for trumpet and just play. So how do we do it? One simple phrase I am sure we have all heard many times- LET GO AND LET GOD! As soon as you put 100% focus in God's direction, it is amazing what you can do!

The cool part of this story? As soon as we started playing after the young girl joined the church, I nailed everything and found the tone that I have always loved. I was smiling and just so thankful for that girl and the love that I felt all around and my focus was 100% on God.

Moral of this blog? LET GO AND LET GOD! (It's also a great way to negate the notorious trumpet ego!)

Felicity Update

So it turns out this is a great way to update people about Felicity.

Last I posted was that they were preparing her for surgery. Well, she came out ok and went home a little over a week later. I stayed a night or two with her during that stay but unfortunately had to leave her so I could get back to work. Well, after staying home for a few days (I honestly don't remember her trip home at this point because it was so short), she was back in the ER and then back with her friends in 3 North. Her pancreas was quite angry with her again for one reason or another and decided to make it known... all 3% of it.

Unfortunately she has been there for over a week again (again, they all run together now so I'm not entirely sure) and sadly missed Addison's 2nd birthday and Mother's day but thankfully did see her girls for a bit on Mother's day. Now for the not so good part...

The not so nice doctor for this week came to see her on Monday and has told her that she shouldn't be making plans to go home anytime soon and that she will be in the hospital until she is better (anywhere from 1 week-6 months). She has had to take all kinds of nasty medicine all week to prepare for xrays, counteract those things, and a few more to do other things to her. I saw her on Tuesday but mostly watched her sleep after a very very long night and from what I hear, things haven't changed too terribly much. At this point, she is nationally ranked as one of (if not THE) worst cases of pancreatitis (the other worsts have about 30% of their pancreas left) and specialists have been called in from Tennessee to help out. You know those people you get compared to so you know how good you are? Yea, shes that one... not the good one, but the terrible case you don't believe is real but a figment of the doctor's imagination so you listen to what they are telling you.

Word on the street though is that Eric saw her yesterday (or today??) and she was looking much better! Our whole family has remained on call this week to take care of the girls and go to G-ville to sit with Felicity. I took care of my nieces on Thursday and had a blast, but at the same time wished I wasn't having to. I will say it was a shocker to see Miss Emmalyn (now 9 months) standing up in her crib when I went in to get her! Not to mention the "let's pile on Aunt J and bounce around and tickle her" that happened later in the afternoon :D Mom left today to spend time with F until Monday morning when she will have to come back to Raleigh for work, and I will probably take her place on Tuesday. As you can probably tell, the rotation never ends.

Please continue to keep Felicity and the whole family in your prayers! Hopefully we can get her home soon where she can finish recovering comfortably and with her family. I'm sure there is nothing she wants more right now than to be curled up in bed with her husband, daughters, and two dogs.

If you want to send her a card, her address at the hospital is:

Felicity Barnes
Pitt County Memorial Hospital
2100 Stantonsburg Rd.
Greenville, NC 27835


If you have any other questions, feel free to shoot me a message or comment and I'll get back to you! Thanks again for all of your continued prayers! They mean the world to us!

My Call

Many people are beginning to ask more questions about why I am going to seminary, so now that I have a minute I just wanted to post this.

I feel that I have been called to use my unique combination of gifts and passions
for music, mission, and youth to help the changing church through a ministerial position. My biggest concern is the lack of attention that the youth receive as the church tries to make these changes, and I want to be there to serve as a voice for the unheard youth, but to also give them opportunities to learn about themselves and their faith.

We continue to ask questions of “How?” and “Why?” as we look to help our
church grow and change, but when the youth speak up with fresh and new ideas, they are ignored because they are young and do not know better. What I want to help the church realize is that the youth do in fact know better and are our future, so we better take the time to listen to what they have to say. The more that we ignore their voices, the less they will say and the less they will come, therefore eventually killing off the church as we know it.

One way that I want to help the youth to enrich their faith so that they have a
foundation to speak up about, is through service and mission. During my time as Co-
Director of Summer in the City (a mission based camp for Presbyterian middle school
youth in Raleigh, NC), I quickly realized that while going abroad for a mission trip is nice, there is so much that needs to be done at home. I feel that I am called to help instill this idea in my youth and help them to reach out to their neighbors in ways that they might otherwise shy away from. The mission trip abroad will not be out of the question because I believe there is so much they could learn from the experience, but I don’t want them to think that they must hop on a plane and go to another country to help someone.

Also, as I have previously mentioned, I am a professional musician and music educator. During my time teaching private lessons and teaching in the public schools, it became very apparent to me that students today do enough to get the ‘A’. They are so bogged down by everything that there is no time for them to fall in love with their music or to find ways to use it outside of the classroom. I want to be able to give my youth a way to not only fall in love with music the way that I did, but to offer their gifts back to God. I want to do this not only through a typical music program, but also through service. If students can work with others in a variety of ways not offered in the school, as they utilize their gifts from God, there is no telling what they could do not only for themselves, but to change the world. Ideally, I would love to help this music program grow by having older members in the church act as mentors for the youth, bridging the gap between generations. The youth will have the opportunity to play in an orchestra type setting that will not only play in church on occasion, but also play for shut-ins at nursing homes or to help raise money for mission and service projects that may or may not involve music.

It is my hope that by engaging the youth, and future of the church, in such a way as
this, the rest of the church will start to listen to them and take them seriously and the gap between generations might begin to disappear. The excitement of the youth will spread throughout the church and a spirit will come alive that will be a key factor in successfully helping our church transition into it’s new form that we are so avidly searching for. As the youth grow older, have their own families, and take on new roles in the church, the experiences from their younger days will influence their decisions and continue to help the church grow in ways that we may not even be able to imagine today.

The key to my ministry though is that while it would be started at one church, it is
my hope that it will spread through the denomination by way of the interactions between the youth at conferences and as churches begin to come together for more programs. So much of what I have learned, I picked up through a discussion with someone at Montreat. I would get excited about it and rush home to put it into action. It is my hope that this will happen with the excitement that I hope to instill in my own youth, igniting the whole denomination with an excitement about our faith and service in a way that it will spread all the way to the top and reach those that typically ignore the youth now.

While I do want to put the primary focus of my ministry on the youth of the
church, I also feel that I am called to work with the church as a whole as I try to help light this fire of excitement. If the rest of the congregation learns with the youth, it will make the church that much stronger. I feel called to do this through bible studies, Sunday school classes, and worship services.

I don’t know that I feel called to be a senior pastor exactly, however I do feel that I am called to do the work of an Associate Pastor. I understand that there are parts of being an Associate Pastor that I may not be completely aware of at this point in time, but I am more than ready to take on anything necessary so that I am able to answer my call using my unique combination of gifts and passions to help the church grow and answer the call of the twenty-first century. I am very excited to have been given the opportunity to attend Union Presbyterian Seminary and I cannot wait to continue to explore my own call as I learn about those of the many leaders of our church that have gone before me. I fully expect things to change slightly as the next three years progress, but one thing will continue to remain the same- I have been called by God in a way that I never expected, and even a way that I tried to run from at times, and I intend on doing everything I can to
continue to discern and answer my call to the best of my ability.

"Return to the nearest road..."

Have you ever been on a long trip and everything is going great, but then all of the sudden you hear "return to the nearest road" repeatedly coming from that stupid plastic box on your mantle? Or what about those signs that read "Rough Road Ahead" or "Uneven Pavement"?

You get the car loaded up with everything that you need- clothes, sunblock, toiletries, snack... everything on the packing list is checked off and you are sure that nothing could go wrong. So you hop in the car and back out of your driveway, only after plugging your destination into your brand new GPS, ready for an adventure. Everything is going great and then you look down to see that you are running extremely low on gas, meanwhile you know there is no gas station for another 15 miles. If you are anything like me, you are now running all kinds of math problems through your head trying to figure out just how much gas is left in your tank and how far that gas will take you, all the while thinking how stupid you were to not fill up last night. Finally, after what seems like a miracle from God, you pull into the gas station running purely on fumes. You get back on the road and things are going great! The GPS has an ETA of 1 hour before you originally planned, meaning you can just sit back and relax. Yep- relax in the traffic that just randomly showed up out of the middle of nowhere, and the man on the radio says you are about 10 miles back from the accident that caused the backup. Forty-five minutes later, you are moving again and irritated that you lost your bumper time, but it is smooth road ahead. Finally, you are almost to your hotel! You take the new bypass to get you there 10 minutes faster (your best friend told you about this, so of course you are going to take it!) and all of the sudden the GPS is screaming at you "return to the nearest road" and has no idea where you are, yet you paid $300 for the fancy one with the unlimited updates...

Doesn't that sound a lot like your year so far? In some cases the problems aren't too extreme, and others make you wish you had only run out of gas because that would have been so much easier. We always think we know what is going to happen and we always plan for any problem that could take place, including remembering to take the new bypass. Just when we think we are in the clear though, that crazy man upstairs decides that the nice neat road in front of us needs to be repaved, causing us to have to slam on the breaks. But WHY???

Maybe God is hoping that we will take advantage of these hard times and turn to him for a minute- even if we are praying that our 1/2 gallon of gas will take us the 25 miles that a full gallon barely does, it gets us putting our focus back on what is most important. Maybe you might just realize that no matter how long you listen to the traffic report on the radio, you will still be stuck 10 miles back and won't make it home in time for dinner so you turn it off and finally notice the gorgeous blue sky above you and say a little thanks to the creator.

The really insane thing? These times aren't just during road trips. That call you got from your parents today saying that your grandparents aren't doing well? Time to look to God. What about the customer that came in and took up an hour of your time, only to leave empty handed? Thank God for the opportunity to meet that customer. Even when you couldn't find that last nickel to pay for your Diet Coke at McDonalds- thank God for the fact that you are only short a nickel and not the drink or even the meal. These road traps are gifts from God, meant for us to stop for a second and remember what we are most thankful for and thank the one responsible for it.

Yea, you are out of gas- but you can still afford to put some more in the car, even at $4.00/ gallon.
You got stuck in traffic? Be thankful that you have a family you are going home to, or a vacation waiting ahead of you.
The GPS didn't update? Enjoy the view and adventure, thanking God for all that you see.

Get it? Got it? Thank God!