Weaknesses and Strengths

Last Friday, I was performing the song Doesn't Mean Anything by Alicia Keys with a band from my worship band class. I was playing keyboard. The song is fairly basic musically. It goes from an E to a C#m to an A, back to an E for most of the song, mixing it up a little bit in the bridge with a few different chords. There's a fairly basic piano part that I play at the beginning and a few parts in the middle. After we performed it, a few people came up to critique us and give us some things to work on. They talked to us about dynamics and how we can really build the song up to the climax just after the bridge, stuff like that. Then the guy who was doing sound came up and talked to me for a minute. He said I was playing all the right things for the song, but there were several times when it seemed like I would accidentally hit a wrong note, as if I was hitting two notes next to each other rather than cleanly hitting the correct note. I wasn't sure exactly where he was talking about, but as we played through the song once more, I watched for it and sure enough, my thumb would periodically hit an F at the same time I was hitting an E. I realized that the reason I was doing this is because my fingers weren't as curved as they should be when I was playing. This is something I've always struggled with for some reason, I play with my fingers very flat. After the song, I went up to Luke, the sound guy, and thanked him for bringing that to my attention so that I could work on that. He went on to tell me I should spend time every day practicing keeping my fingers curved while playing. I can play scales or chords and focus on keeping them curved so that this weakness would eventually become my strength.

As I was thinking about this later, I realized that this should be how we approach our weaknesses in life. Often I think Christians have defeatist attitudes. They accept their weaknesses as "just the way they are." I know I've had this attitude about myself a lot in the past. As followers of Christ, we should be walking in victory. When God calls things in our lives to our attention, we need to allow Him to change us, so that those weaknesses we have in our life eventually become our strength. It's not about striving on our own though, but allowing Jesus to change us and having faith that He can and will change our weaknesses into strengths so that we can help others with the same thing we struggled with. Hope this encourages you!

The last six weeks

Well since so many thousands of people have begged me for another post, here it is. Ok maybe only a few.. and maybe not really begged.. except KLUB, he begged. I warned you guys in my very first post I may not be the best at updating this, lol. So the last six weeks or so have been amazing. I've seen God do incredible things in my life and the lives of friends of mine. I'm learning a lot in the classes I'm taking, God's presence is powerful at every church and chapel service, and overall, I think God is just working a lot on my character. When I say things have been amazing, not all of it has been easy or comfortable. There are a lot of areas in my life that God is bringing to light that I don't like, but as He's showing them to me, He's healing me. For example, one thing God's shown me is how selfish I can be. My motivations for many things I do, even in ministry, is on me and how it makes me feel. More and more, God is changing my mindset from looking at me to looking at Him and others.

Another thing God's showing me is how powerless I am at changing myself. I have a tendency when I see an area that needs to change to strive towards changing it myself. While there may be practical things I can do to bring about the change, I'm seeing that if I just keep my eyes on Jesus and let Him transform me, there's a lot less heartache and failure.

So things have been really busy. I feel like time is going by faster here than at any other time of my life. Last week was Father's Day in Australia, so they moved the Sunday Night Service to Friday night. That freed up Sunday to go to the beach with some friends. I had an amazing time. We watched the sunset over the beach, then after it had gone down, I went for a short swim. It was pretty cold, so I didn't spend much time in the water. Everyone with me thought I was a little insane for going into the water, and to be honest, I've always known I'm not totally sane, so whatever. I ate a kangaroo burger, which was very tasty, and then we walked along the beach for a while before heading home.

Sunday night services during August were incredible. Every August they do what's called Sunday Night Live, and it's basically church like you've never seen it. They present the messages in such creative ways with drama and music hitting certain points home. A lot of people gave their life to the Lord this month. Praise God!

Well, I'll try to update sooner than six weeks from now. God bless you guys!