Saturday Fun!!

Last week, I spent 17 hours at church scrapping cracks and mudding them in, sanding, priming, and painting. That entire week, I listened to worship CDs over the church’s sound system, since I was working in the santuary. For the past two weeks, at least, I had had the sond “Savior King” stuck in my head. It’s a very good song to have captured my brain, as opposed to the bad conotations we have when we think of a song “stuck” in our heads. In fact, I really didn’t have any desire to dislodge it.
The youth worship team did this song for their Sunday and made a CD of all the songs they’d chosen. On Monday and Wednesday of last week and all the week before, I listened to that CD over and over, but Wednesday night I “stole” “Facedown” from Anna (I’ll return it when I finish my work at church on Wednesday) and listened to it on Friday and Saturday.
By Saturday morning, I’d spent 10 hours at church and 43 hours at work. The Valient Men had a prayer meeting at 7:30 that morning and I had been told by God the Sunday before that I needed to go, so off I went.
I prayed with the four other men that came until 9 and set up to finish painting the santuary. I popped “Facedown” into the player and went to work, ocassionally singing along with the annointed Matt Redmann. My heart already soft and malleable from an hour and a half of prayer, whenever I’d start to sing along, the words of the songs and the impomptu praise from Matt would take deeper meaning and tears would well up in my eyes. I stopped painting at least three times because my tears of awe and joy blocked my vision of the physical world and I couldn’t see where I was supposed to paint. At least once, I set down my brush or roller and declared praise to God in my own words.
I didn’t get done at church until 4pm (Ie I worked nonstop on painting for 7 hours) but I never felt the pains of hunger except for God to be praised as He deserved, both in my life and in the life of the people I knew. For those seven hours, God was incredibly real and acutely worthy of my praise.
The night before I had complained to everybody about how I was going to struggle through the work I needed to do Saturday, but when it came time to do it, the work wasn’t an obligation for me but a service that I was happily willing to do. It is truly amazing what God has done in my life so far this summer to mature me into His likeness, but the summer’s still got a week left. There’s still much more He can do in me and through me.

JA Menter

“And He who began a good work in me is faithful to carry it out to completion until the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”