If I haven’t mentioned it before, Pastor Man is a great pastor. He really is. He was a deciding factor in choosing our church. (I really think that our church chose us, but that’s another post for another day….)

Often times, emails are sent or power points are put together with minor typos and I being the joker love to point them out to him. He’s a good sport about them, and often states that he does it on purpose to make sure people are paying attention. I’m not sure how many others are paying attention, but I am.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t look forward to Sundays to see if I can spot a misspelling or grammatical error in the bulletin or on the power point, and I never call him out on them in front of others… I simply wait until I can get a good jab in… and we both laugh.

It’s been a big joke between us for as long as I’ve been attending the church… (about 9 months now…)

In fact, in my very first meeting with him… the very first time I met the man and before I started to build a relationship with him, I pointed out a typo on the church website. I guess that’s where it all started.

I should’ve known that at some point in time this would all come back around on me.

In the back of my mind, I knew it would… but I’m a good sport about it… I knew that if I could dish it out, I needed to be able to take it… and that’s one of the reasons that I joke around a lot… I like people to joke back.

My church family is GREAT about this… totally squashing the theory that Christians don’t have any fun. We have TONS of fun…

So back to this joke coming around to bite me in the bum…

Yesterday was Pastor Appreciation Sunday at our church. The daughter of two of our members had come in town to lead the worship music. I, along with the youth group and some other members, helped put together an entire service to honor him and our Youth leader. The kids did a great little skit, the youth led the announcements and the call to worship, and yours truly was to bring the message.

Yes, I gave the sermon yesterday. My mother joked that she imagined me doing many things in my life, but preaching was not one of them… just shows God’s sense of humor.

I can’t take all the credit for putting the message together. I found a website that had an outline and I filled it in. But the message was all about Paul and how he was an apostle but first and foremost, he was a pastor. Paul faced many hardships, but his greatest hardship was the constant concern for the people in his churches… it was a pretty good message so says my fellow parishioners when all was said and done.

I wanted this service to have the integrity that normal services had. He asked for it not to be hokey and therefore, I decided to put together a power point for he sermon. I wanted it to be professional. I wanted to do a good job. And, honestly, my anal tendencies kicked in. I was going all out.

As I was preparing the power point Saturday night, I was frustrated. By the time I got around to working on it, it was already 9. I had also been asked to put together a tribute slide show for both of them and I just kept looking at the clock and wondering when I was going to get it all done.

Although the message had been done for a week or so, I still hadn’t had time to really practice and knowing that I needed to be to church early to help set up for the Praise the Pastor Potato lunch, I started to stress.

I did take a little break in there to call him and tell him that I just couldn’t do this every Saturday night and asked him how he did it. There was my first thank you… because seriously? I like my Saturday nights to be stress free. Where I can go and veg at a friend’s house or sit here and watch movies with the kiddos….

Anywho, at about 11:30 I wrapped up my stuff. I went back and reviewed all my slides checking for typos. I ran the spell check and when it came back clean, I burned my presentations to a disk, gathered all of my stuff for the following morning and placed them in my God bag (this is the bag that I cart back and forth to Church activities). I rounded up the kids’ stuff for the morning and went back and checked the God bag again.. making sure that I had everything that I needed.

Sunday morning came and the kids were up and ready with minimal incidences… I, however, was a nervous wreck. What was I thinking? I am so not qualified to give the message or to coordinate a service. The doubts in my abilities to speak in front of a group were overcoming me. And it’s really silly. I am a public speaker. I’m good at it. I love to do it. So why was this morning any different. For whatever reason, I guess I felt that because it was based on Biblical facts that I was unqualified to do it. Which is a little silly, but that’s where I was at the time.

I changed my outfit three times. Nothing seemed good enough to wear when standing in front of your entire congregation. I was a ball of nerves and how I managed to actually get out of this house is beyond me.

Arriving at church, I occupied my thoughts with setting up the Fellowship hall with the teens and by the time the Sunday School hour rolled around, it was done. I carted all the kids, both the little ones and the big ones down to the sanctuary to practice. The nerves came back. My fear of a “hokey” service were prominent. But I kept praying that everything would go off smoothly…

and it did. God’s so amazing.

It was a beautiful service. The music was amazing. The kids did what they were supposed to do. And I got up there and gave the message. A message that had just a little fun to poke at the pastor.

We started it with a top 10 list… the top 10 signs that your pastor didn’t study this week… with the number one sign being that he asked me to preach…

And when I started speaking, my confidence returned. I really am in my element when I’m speaking.

At one point during the sermon I saw one of the teens and Pastor Man chuckle. No, I take that back… they weren’t chuckling… they were outright laughing.

I was pleased with myself in that I didn’t let it distract me. Although, for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why they might be laughing. I hadn’t said anything funny. In fact, it was the dramatic point in my sermon… where I say, “Yes, Paul was an Apostle but he was first and foremost a Pastor.” I would go on to tell our congregation about how our Pastor resembled Paul.

After the service, as we were eating lunch, they revealed to me why they were laughing…

“Hey Heather…” Pastor Man called. “Did you realize that you had a typo in the power point?” He asked and my heart sank. It wasn’t perfect. “Isn’t it funny how you always point out mine and now I get to point out yours?”

He was grinning from ear to ear, quite pleased with himself for noting an error on my part.

I know he was waiting for me to respond, so I put on a great big smile and said, “I did that on purpose. I didn’t want you to feel as if I might be able to better deliver messages to the congregation….”

And with that, I turned and headed back to the desert line.

Until next time…

Heather

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