I was having the strangest dream last night. And it was one of those where you wake up partly through it, but when you get back to sleep it starts right back up, as if I had hit pause on my DVD player.

Here is the dream, as best as I can remember it:

It started out with me trying to find a parking space at this huge church I was going to. I did find one, but it was quite a ways away from the church. I say huge, it was more just large. And I knew this was Curtis Baptist in Augusta, though it was a new building in a new place and it wasn't in Augusta. These were just things I knew.

Anyway, I got to church with about 5 minutes to spare and I found out that I was leading the music. Me, leading music in front of about 5000 people. I was a little nervous.

I was also nervous because I had no idea what hymns were being sung and they were out of programs. I searched and searched and I found one. I got up to the pulpit and realized I had no hymnal. The pastor handed me the one he had, I tried to refuse it because it was the 1975 Baptist hymnal and not the 1991 Baptist hymnal (I look back on this now as very strange. Two reasons: One: Curtis was the first church I knew to use the Word hymnal, I am sure they have the new Celebration hymnal now. Two: Curtis probably doesn't do much hymn singing from what I have heard. But these are not important points as this was a dream and in a dream anything can happen) and obviously, the hymn numbers aren't the same between the two. Well, I managed to find the first hymn, the instrumentalists had already started playing, and I had a hard time coming in with them.

When the second hymn came along I couldn't bring the people in at all for some reason. It was like I had never conducted anyone before. With the third hymn I couldn't find the melody or any of the harmony notes at all, it was as if I had never sung before.

Well, after the service was over I left to go to my car. However, I couldn't remember WHERE I had parked. At this point the place looked more like downtown New Orleans with a very nice make over so it doesn't look like crap, I don't now why.

I woke up and went back to sleep.

When it started back I was back at church, it was the evening service and they wanted me to direct the hymns again (I haven't got a clue why they would have asked me back after the morning's fiasco). I again was without a program but someone gave me theirs and I began looking up the hymns. My father was in the pew in front of me and kept trying to get me to use the ‘75 hymnal even though the numbers don't match up. I ended up yelling at him with my eyes. I don't know how, but I did. It wasn't something that I was seeing or aware of how it happened, just that I knew it happened. Not that I had mouths in place of my eyes, I used my eyes to convey what I was saying, almost telepathically.

For some reason the wife of my pastor at the church I just resigned from was having the kids at this church do something before the service started and she was stressing out muchly about this. (She does this all the time, I just don't know why she was at this church.) After the kids were done the organ was to play the prelude, the pastor was to say the welcome, and then I was to direct the hymns. I ended up spacing out and missing the cue to come direct the hymns so I was just sitting there and people were looking at me. The pastor got my attention and I got up there, but then I realized I no longer had the program! I found one and turned to the first hymn, announced it, the instrumentalists started playing something other than what I had in front of me and had announced and I realized that I had last May's program!!! The stupid instrumentalists kept on playing right through whatever the heck they were playing. Then they started in on the next hymn without even so much as a nod from me, I didn't get a chance to find the right program, hymn, or announce it. I ended up just sitting back down and the pastor started singing something totally off key and then I woke up.

I don't know what this says about me. Maybe it's just some subconscious thing because I have not been in the pulpit since the week before Christmas, almost a month now, the longest I have been out of the pulpit in three and a half, almost four years. Also I wonder about the whole trying to use the '76 (what a piece of crap it was) hymnal in place of the '91 thing.

In other news, I spent two hours tonight trying to figure out what kind of animal was living inbetween the floor of the room above me and the ceiling of this one, that would make a rhythmic tapping noise every few seconds like clockwork. It turned out it was the sound of my cellphone looking for a network being picked up by my subwoofer.


- posted by Nick @ 1/18/2004 01:33:00 AM | 0 comments