A Struggle from Start to Finish

I lead singing at church this last Sunday, which is something I do every month or so, as the rotation dictates.  It's something I usually enjoy but this time was a struggle for me from start to finish. 

 

To start it all off, I had a terrible time selecting the songs to lead.  I generally try to model my services after a theme topic or verse.  This time I had nothing to go on.  I thought it would be easy to just pick a few random songs that went together but that proved to be extremely difficult for me.  In the end I came up with my own vague theme that was probably only apparent to me but it took a week to come to that point. 

 

Because it took all week to come up with the songs, I missed the church bulletin deadline. That meant I had to go print out my own order of worship and make copies to hand out on Sunday morning.  When I went to go do that the printer at the church was out of ink, so I had to print out a copy on the fax machine. Annoying, but not the end of the world. 

 

I thought that I had experienced the last of my struggles after the song selection and printer issues but that wasn't the case.  When Sunday morning came I felt miserable.  I had a terrible head/neck ache that left me marginally nauseous.  Fortunately, unbeknownst to the majority of the congregants I was able to push through the service in pain. It went relatively smoothly.  I lead one song too high and another lower than desirable, but neither of those instances bothered me too much.  Those are somewhat common occurrences in my church.  It just was a miserable experience having to ignore the pain for an hour and a half, and it left me utterly exhausted. 

 

I knew it was a bad sign when I began my preparations for the service that week, but I had no idea it would be such a struggle.  Next time I might think twice about leading singing if it starts out the way it did this time.