Captain's Corner

So I have two sides to my job… what I do during the week, involving producing, shooting and editing video… and then what I do on the weekends, which is help with the live production of our weekend services at our main campus.  I have a confession to make at this point.  While I may be competent at many various roles in live production… I don’t really feel like I excell at any of them.  This weekend however… I filled a position I almost never do, I ran one of our two graphics machines.

Now, I understand a good bit about how these machines run, heck during the week I work with several others on setting up the many graphics we use during the weekend services.  That being said, I’m not all that great on actually running the things.  It could be lack of practice, it could be it’s just not something I’m meant to get… I dunno.  But at any rate on this particular weekend we had several special songs… one of which was “Savin’ Me” by Nickelback… which is a pretty fast paced song.  Now I wasn’t doin’ so hot on the beginning of the song, but half way through is where, during our Saturday service (which gets sent to all of our campuses for their Sunday playback), I *ahem* screwed the pooch.  My fat, sausage-like fingers hit an extra button while advancing a slide… this attempted to call up an empty slide number since the extra key I hit was the “6″ key (it tried to call up slide 6, which was not existent).  To compensate, I attempted to go directly to the slide I needed to be on… which had the wonderful effect of resetting the dissolve rate between slides to the default value of 20 frames (2/3′s of a second)… which is an extremely long rate for such a fast song… in fact, the slides were still dissolving while I attempted to go to the next slide.  Quick thinking (on Christy Hartley’s part) got me on a blank slide and I just stayed out for the instrumental bridge and came back in for the last verse…

Not my best moment ever… though to be honest, with a couple more run throughs (Sunday morning), the 9:30 and 11:00 services came out alright… But to be completely honest Saturday could only be called pathetic.  Then again, maybe it was the fear of repeating Saturday’s performance that kept me on my toes this morning.

The great news is that God can use us, even when we completely blow it… this particular weekend was our “Impact Weekend” which is designed especially for the unchurched and we encourage our members to bring their neighbors, co-workers, classmates, etc…  It’s usually more “salvation-driven” than some of our other services, and towards the end Pastor Steve asked for a show of hands for people who made a decision.  Despite my mistake (and a couple others I had nothing to do with)… there were still plenty of other hands raised.  When I am weak (and clumsy, and a little slow and panicky), God is strong.

On that note, I’m gonna go take a nap and try to forget yesterday happened…

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