Dry Ground

Earlier this evening I was reading a blog post from a friend and was moved by how insightful his writings were. This got me to think about my own blog and the lack of writing that I've been doing as of late. (Yes I've known, it's almost like I've been avoiding this blog for a while.) Why is that? I thought about it for a while, and discovered the answer I've known within myself for a while now. I am dry.
Writing just like anything else that has potential to inspire others, should come from an overflow from our daily walk. From those times where we have thoughts and wishes welling up within us that we just can't not share with others.
Tonight I realized once again, this has been a hard year and as much as I've tried to hold my head up and confirm that God is in control, it has been a challenge. Confirming this once again, just a few minutes ago I read my journal post from this year. For the first time ever in my life I began to journal my walk with Christ this year. Marking the highs and the lows, the joys and sorrows, (long guitar solos :) the times of assurance as well as utter confusion when trying to follow Christ.
Change of life, job, dealing with pneumonia, making new friends, dealing with pneumonia a second time, as well as the constant struggle to make ends meet and keep our heads above water all the while doing our best to live right and not be judgmental of others.
When I thought about just how dry I am, I saw a mental image much like the picture I've posted here. Growing up in the deserts of Arizona I'm no stranger to dry, cracked ground, and even if you took water and poured it onto that ground, although the water would instantly soak in, it would still show the scars of being dry. It takes time and regular amounts of water for those scars to disappear. So I'm OK now with the dry, if it's something that my family and I needed to go through. Why? I have no idea. But all I can do it trust that God knows what's happening in our life and will continue to guide us and direct us.
There's a song I grew up singing in my home church that has been going through my mind as of late, "He didn't bring us this far to leave us. He didn't teach us to swim to let us drown. He didn't put this hope in us, to move away. He didn't lift us up, to let us down."

Proverbs 16: 20 "It pays to take life seriously; things work out when you trust in God"

If you are reading this and you're dry too, let's pray for rain.

Technology And The Way Jesus Did It.

Sometimes I wonder if we really make this whole "church" thing to complicated. As you know I'm new to Valley Church and one of the things I'm responsible for is maintaining and creating the "loops" used during the Sunday Services. It's something that I really enjoy doing, but sometimes wonder why do we do it? It's actually quite the process. I create the loops, which aren't really loops but full blown sequences, in Logic Audio. I then bump the sequences down into 8 separate tracks and then load them into Ableton Live. From here they are routed out via an M-Audio interface through ADAT to our Yamaha automated sound console, where the "loops" can then be mixed as needed for our live settings. Easy enough?? When it works, but this week I had to go and screw it up.
Earlier this past week I sent out and email and of course it went out as sent from dburggraaf, the previous owner of the laptop I'm now using, and a couple of my friends gave me some crap for not having changed the owner of the laptop yet. So I proceeded to change the name of the computer and the home screen name to tyates. Which was great until I rebooted my MacBook Pro the next day to find an entirely new desktop and screenset. Then when I went to go open the software I use on a weekly basis it began asking for all of the serial numbers and wanted to authenticate all of the software again. Which is fine...if you know where all of that stuff is. Did I mention that I am new here!! So after a fun (not really) week of trying to get this all figured out, I thought I had it. Until I booted up this morning to realize that I hadn't re-figured out the ADAT thing. So for the first time since I've been here at Valley we went the entire morning with no loops, and you know who noticed...the band. Yeah that's it! Everyone else said the worship, "rocked, sounded great, inspiring." So I come back to my initial thought, do we make this harder than it needs to be?? Would Jesus use loops?

Tim