Whew. I took 2 days off from work and spent Thursday through Sunday on a retreat weekend with my praise team group from our church.
While it's the first days off I've had in a while, I'm totally exhausted. It's not unexpected, as this is my third time on this retreat, but unfortunate, nonetheless.
That said, it was AWESOME. Roger Breland (Mr. Breland to anyone besides his wife, I'm sure) visited us. Mr. Breland was the founder of the contemporary christian music juggernaut TRUTH. For 31 years, this man took vocally talented individuals, and made them an excellent team that happens to sing. 31 years, 10000 concerts, and 3 million miles later, he winds up at our retreat weekend. There was a lot to learn.
His philosophy is that God deserves our absolute best in all we do. If we knew Jesus was going to physically walk into our performance tomorrow, wouldn't we make sure we looked good, knew our words, parts, etc? Sure! The second part of his philosophy is that if you remove the “non-excellent” things from what you do, it doesn't distract the individuals watching (audience, congregation, etc) from your message... THE Message.
I'll tell you, we worked our butts off. But that's good. He challenged us and the team responded. They also made it clear that they wanted to work harder and become “excellent”. It was a call to action for Lee (our worship team minister). He stated that he was shocked that the team basically said, “Come on. Let's go.” He didn't expect to be pushed like this as if the team were “waiting” for him. ...but that's OK.
Man, there's so much to talk about from this weekend. Certainly, it wasn't all about being excellent. That's too simplistic. Excellence for the wrong reasons is worthless. We also started a new book called The Purpose Driven Life. I'm only through the 5th chapter/day out of 40, but so far it is simply amazing. The author has a very “to-the-point” way about him. He's sure to step on many peoples' toes, as he has mine. I'm anxious to get through it, but I'm going to (try to) discipline myself to do as he suggests and only do one chapter per day.
More later. I'm still working on much of the weekend...not to mention recovering from it... :)