my life…in text format

I missed a week. Sorry. Ingenuity and Pandemonium.

Thankfully there wasn’t one huge thing that went wrong this past week. Unfortunately there wasn’t a huge blinding moment of shear creative brilliance I can write about either.

Our set up for services includes 4 large free standing canvases. They are painted with the youth name and a cool artsy design. Two weeks ago, during our Wednesday evening service for teenagers we had a guest speaker. Towards the end of his sermon, he was giving an altar call and two of the members of the praise and worship band started to play a song. As the momentum picked up, the music was gearing up, the drummer walked towards the stage to add a nice rhythm to the music.

Well…he took a bad route to the stage and moved one of those canvases just enough for him to get through…it was a little too much movement.

He let go of the piece and noticed that it was no longer secure. He grabbed a hold of it started to fix it and went to let go of it again…and again it started to fall.

All this is happening right in front of the stage.

I realized what was happening and quickly walked behind the canvas and grabbed a hold of it so he could go play the drums.

I spent the rest of the service behind that frame of stretched canvas just hoping that I wouldn’t lose my grip and somebody who had come up to start or further a relationship with Jesus Christ didn’t get knocked in the head with a piece of canvas.

I was able to get it secure again, but it was a slightly terrifying moment nonetheless.

How was your week?

Ok…so in keeping with the Ingenuity & Pandemonium genre, (you can check out where this idea started here) I have a story.

The organization I work for, Safehouse, recently partnered with another youth ministry, Next Valley Youth Movement, in order to more effectively reach this valley in which we are located. We hosted the band Fireflight with two other bands to put on a concert this past Friday.

The show rocked. Almost 300 students jumped, danced, screamed, cheered and laughed their way through 2 hours of rock show mastery. Little did they know what happened behind the scenes before the concert…

Myself and another member of our team were fixing a lighting problem. Two of our scanner fixtures had blown bulbs so we got some new ones and proceeded to change them. Well, the problem wasn’t with the bulbs, it was something with the wiring. So as soon as we turned on the fixtures with the new bulbs, they kicked on and immediately blew out.

So we have four fixtures with only two working bulbs. The problem we faced now, was that the two fixtures that were blown were on the same stand. So, we figured, “Hey, we’ll just take one working fixture from the other stand, put it over here and at least we’ll have two lights, balancing out the stage.”

(Enter Pandemonium)

These fixtures are not very light. They are deceptively heavy, actually. As we (my buddy and I) worked to get the fixture off, straining and holding on, we finally loosened it from the fixture.

All of a sudden, the light still secured to the fixture started to lean…and it kept leaning and kept leaning.

Until gravity did what gravity does best and pulled it towards the ground.

Right on top of Fireflight’s drumset.

While the drummer was doing a sound check.

Yes. You read that right.

We let a light fixture drop onto Fireflight’s drumset while the drummer was doing a sound check.

My day was ruined.

No damage was done, thankfully. He was kind, joking, and understanding. The guitarist then made a reference to the light fixture on the other side of the stage and said, “Could you make sure this one doesn’t fall on my guitars.” Or something along those lines. I think he was joking, but he may have been seriously worried now.

It was an awful moment in creative production, but makes for a great post on Monday afternoon!

Needless to say, Fireflight rocked, and the other bands that played that night were fantastic as well.

The Jesse David Worship Project and Eleventh Hour are awesome. You should check them out.

I’m glad that moment is in the past.

Lesson Learned: Never underestimate the weight of a light fixture. (Here’s a model similar to ours.)

Ok…I’m jumping on board with Neil on the ingenuity & pandemonium idea. Each and every Monday. I’ll post something that happened with our creative side of service(s). Something that went horribly wrong, or not so horribly wrong, but just wrong. Or something went off smooth like silk.

I like the idea of learning and growing from each other.

So here’s the first one.

This past Wednesday at our youth service we started a new video series called “Will It Hurt?” The premise: We film something painful happening to somebody and they rate it on our WILL IT HURT scale. The video was a great success and the students loved it. We filmed a student getting duct tape pulled off of his hairy leg. It was disturbing…and wonderful.

Until the end, we added a tag of me, the host, just for fun…goofing off for the camera. Well, the person running the video during service thought the video was on a loop and just started over, so he paused it.

At the worst possible moment, he paused it. I was making the craziest face and he refused to hit play again. So, for what seemed like forever, there I am on the screen with a very odd facial expression. It ended up really loosening the crowd and giving everybody just another reason to have a good time, but lesson learned.

-Don’t put so much black between the end of the video and tag at the end.
-Test run the video with the person running it (very important to test run with the person that will actually be running it that night).

Here’s the video: