For those who don’t already know this, Tim & I both play on our church’s weekend worship team . It’s a fairly significant time commitment with an evening of practice & dinner during the week, practicing at home after practice (LOL), serving at three services each weekend, showing up early for practice before the services, etc., Add in the the fact that we live 30-40 minutes away (depending on who is driving – lol) and well, it amounts to a significant block of time budgeted into our calendar of activities. You can imagine there’s not a long list of people standing in line to serve in this capacity.

Our “normal” schedule is 2 weekends on/2 weekends off. However, the other bass player quit sometime late last fall leaving Tim to pick up a lot of extra weekends until another bass player was ready to be integrated into the schedule. The keyboard player who plays opposite me is leaving to be the music pastor at a new church plant so I’ve been covering some of his weekends as he needs time to prepare for his new position and we’ve been doing a lot of switching around in our schedules to make sure one of us is always there. IOW, the keyboard/bass worship schedule has been a little crazy and we don’t have a “normal” on/off schedule right now. (LOL).

Awhile ago, I had asked for last weekend off, but my request was somehow lost with the hecticness of all the switching around we’ve had to do lately. We do have a new gal who has played one time and she’ll eventually be worked into the schedule, but she isn’t in the schedule rotation yet. On short notice last week when our worship leader realized he hadn’t found someone to cover for me, he called to see if the new gal could play. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to on short notice.

Because Tim & I both feel a very strong sense of committment and responsibility to our worship leaders and the rest of the team, we will not leave them high and dry with no one to fill our spots even if there was an oversight regarding requested time off. So, when I found out a couple of hours before worship team practice last week that there wasn’t anyone to cover for me, I was torn between staying home to play and going to Em’s first travel volleyball tournament.

Originally, the plan was to have Amanda go with Em & I to the tourney so we could enjoy a little girls’ weekend away time. However, when I called Amanda about the keyboard predicament, she offered to stay and cover for me. I quickly (well however quickly one can make an hour round trip drive 2x – lol) ran Josh home after his basketball practice and then hurried back to town so I could help Amanda through the practice – figuring out the settings, loading a particular sound, chosing the pads, etc., Nathan chose to go back to town with me because he really likes going to worship team practice. Thanks to him I have the above and below picture to share with you all.