May the Word have the run of the house

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. Colossians 3:16

Before telling us about the stuff we as musicians like to hear, Paul first tells us to keep the word of Christ in us. The Message translation even says that the word should "have the run of the house"

Practice on Thursday night was good... praise choir practiced for a half hour, then the band came, and practiced with the praise choir. Stacy, a church music student, and field worker from Concordia was our guest pianist, and did a wonderful job. Drummer Dan joined us, which is always nice since after twelve years of contemporary worship, we can count on two hands the amount of Sunday's we have had a drummer. We got through the songs in an efficient manner, and just as the choir was getting ready to leave for the evening, I grabbed a bible to pick a Psalm for a quick devotion, I paged through the Psalms looking for something short, found one, promptly closed the bible, with out reading it, and told the choir to join me in the basement to practice one last song for Easter. "um... Ellen" Janice politely said, "you were going to read a Psalm to us" I looked at the closed bible in my hand, and remembered the 'quick devotion' I was going to have, and realized how one tracked my mind was that evening and on so many other occasions. Forgetting a devotion here, not remembering to pray before worship there. Often I am so focused on the task at hand, I forget about focusing on the One who authors our tasks.

Today, I was reading in Nathan's new blog, www.leadgracefully.com/blog/ and saw words that really spoke to me as I reflected on Thursday's practice. he says

"This week, lighten the load, pick some older songs and do a shorter set so that you can set aside 15 minutes of rehearsal to do a devo, scripture reading, prayer, etc. Let’s prayerfully fall on Jesus, being filled up in the Spirit before attempting to lead others to do the same. "

I believe that my not remembering to spend more time in the Word and prayer with the music groups, is a direct result of me not making the time to do so in my own personal life. Not only am I going to begin proactively securing this time for myself, I think I will also try to find people in our groups, to be devotion and prayer leaders, who would take on that role at practice and before worship.

May the Word have the run of our practices!!