The Show Must Go On

In some ways that kind of describes my weekend. Not that church is a show…just that the saying held true to form. If you follow my Twitter or read my post on Saturday, I shared that I received some horrible news early Saturday morning. Thanks to all of you who have been praying throughout this weekend and continue to do so.

The Resnick family is one of the most involved families in our entire church and early Saturday morning/late Friday night they lost their dad Scott in a plane crash. Here is a news release with a video about Scott Resnick’s death, and here is a great blog post with a couple videos of Scott. They do a much better job of describing Scott and what happened then I could. Janet also wrote a great post on what the morning at Sunset meant to her.

UPDATE: KOIN News ran a great story on Scott during their 5:30pm newscast and even included an interview with Sunset’s high school director Mike Giering (starts about 8 minutes into the video).

Scott’s wife, Holly, was at worship team practice on Thursday and was scheduled to sing this weekend. I missed singing with her this morning. Many people in our church were and are being affected in a deep way, and the worship ministry has a close relationship with their family so coming and leading worship yesterday was not an easy task.

After something like this you go between feeling like playing music and singing is the last thing you would want to do and then feeling like it is the only thing in the world to do.

Playing and leading the congregation when one of our fellow team members was going through so much was not easy. I am so proud of the band and vocalists for the way they contributed to the morning. For us, the show needed to go on because being together as a community provided a chance to worship and grieve as a community.

In the end we switched up a few songs in each service in order for all the songs to fit the mood of the day. Both Jay and Barb did an incredible job of leading in the moment. Barb even scrapped her entire message to speak on a more poignant topic: grief and suffering in John 11.

I felt a different vibe at Sunset. It wasn’t an “us” and “them” vibe, it was a “we” vibe. There was a sense of “we’re in this together and nothing else really matters.” I hope we can build on that feeling of community.

What are some lessons you have learned while leading through grief?

Those of you who were there yesterday, how would you sum up the morning?