So this past Saturday I worked some long-ish hours. I mean I normally go in to work at 3pm and I’m done by 7, 7:30 at the latest. This past Saturday I went in to work at 12 noon and left at 11pm. I didn’t mind (and had obviously planned) to go in early. We had just finished acting as a satellite campus for Willow Creek’s Summit, which is a leadership conference and we had to reset the stage and studio for our weekend services, the first of which was Saturday at 6, which rehearsal starting at 3:30pm.
What got me was staying late. Normally we record our Saturday service and send it off to our varied campii. We capture directly in Final Cut Pro, where we make a timeline with just the sermon, transfer to individual harddrives for each campus and they play back from their G5/Mac Pro towers. In addition to this we provide a DVD-RAM disc as a back up. DVD-RAM (for those unfamiliar) is a re-writable DVD technology that has longer use and greater reliability than traditional DVD+/-RW’s. Not only that but it requires no finalization, so when we need to send a copy immediately, it can be done. However, and this is important to the story, DVD-RAMs are not universally read and/or written to because it uses a different writing method than traditional DVDs.
Now, the above is not true of every campus. We have one smaller campus that does not have a G5 tower. They use a DVD-RAM as their main sermon playback and a DVD-R as their backup. Where does the DVD-R come from? Well, we also record one (yes, one, as in singular) DVD-R Master of every service. On Saturdays this disc is duplicated (quickly) so that it can be used as a secondary back up for most campii and a primary backup for this smaller campus. Herein lied the problem this past Saturday.
Now, I’m not going to point fingers, because I honestly don’t care… but someone scratched the DVD-R master. I don’t know if it was scratched prior to recording, while being removed, while being duplicated, whatever. The problem is that it was scratched and would only play half of the sermon and would not duplicate. This is where laziness tried to set in. I told myself… “It’s only a backup for one campus, that they’ll never use, why should I go to the hassle of making something for them?”
Now Laziness is a beast I have fought for many years, but this past Saturday it was close to winning. Nonetheless I take pride in my work, beat back the beast, and exported the sermon from Final Cut, waited a couple hours for it render, and burned the DVD backup. Kevin McGuffey, the campus pastor for this satellite patiently waited for the disc and I played a video game while it rendered. Finally the disc finished and I sent Kevin on his way. I went home, apologized to my guests for being late and to the wife for having to handle a fussy baby and entertain company at the same time, ate some cold pizza and watched the last 1o minutes of 300. I was grumpy and tired, but by morning the situation had mostly faded from annoyance to just acceptance of doing my job.
Then God thumped me upside the head. I may have forgotten to mention that last weekend was “Impact Weekend”. It’s a weekend we tailor more than usual to the seeker and we encourage our members to invite their friends, family, and co-workers as an extremely safe weekend… no deep theology, just great music and an emphasis on salvation. So yesterday I swung by the office to pick up some footage I needed for a side-project and on my way out my boss stopped me to tell me that there had been an error in recording to the DVD-RAM for the same campus I had worked so hard to provide a back up for. In fact, their DVD-RAM disc was blank. The only way they had of having a sermon was my back up. Well, that makes it all worthwhile… but it doesn’t end there. I was told a woman had prayed to receive Christ at the end of the sermon. Now, in my line of work, somewhere deep in the back of your mind you know the impact that you have (good or bad depending on how you do your job), but so seldom do you see God working directly through your very actions to change a life. Sunday God did that. He worked through my actions to reach down and permanently alter the course of at least one woman’s life. And by God, that’s enough for me. Oh, and to anyone I complained to about working late, I’m sorry. I had no idea how important working late this past Saturday was, but I should have known that God knew.
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