Remarkable. That was the title of the Christmas Eve sermon this year. One of the blessings of attending 3 Christmas Eve services is you get to hear the sermon 3 times, and thus it tends to sink in a bit more than your every-day sermon. Additionally, I think most good pastor's realize that the audience of the Christmas Eve sermon is significantly different. The question was, what makes Christmas remarkable. The answer centered around the first half of John 3:16 - that God loved us so much that he sent us as savior, his son, into this "messed up world", where the biggest mess is death. Hallelujah!

My "job" this year again was to be "in charge" of the sound. I tell you, it is a lot of work. See, we setup in our gym because there is not nearly enough room in the sanctuary. We have a huge blessing in that we rent our the gym and some of our spare office space to another church. So they have the equipment needed to set up properly in the gym, and they're gracious enough to let us borrow anything we need. That saves us from having to tear apart everything. But my, just running cables everywhere for everything, it just takes lots of time. It's all worth it thou. I don't get to sit where I can really hear the result during the first service since I'm playing bass guitar, but for the other two services I get to run the sound board, and when the choir sings and it fills the room, I just sit back and smile. Then when the men's choir sings and the synthesizer and digital piano and conga's are going and everything blends (well, the conga's don't really blend... but they're not supposed to), I'm pretty sure I was beaming. It's pretty much a thankless job, the kind of thing nobody thinks about unless it goes wrong. I'm aware of that, and I'm ok with that. But at our church, I get thanked anyway by the few people who have some idea of the work and effort that goes into it.

After church on Christmas Day (again, more sound), I went to the Baxter's for Christmas brunch with the Rosenbaum/Koepke/Blanton "Kansas" crew. I left there fairly early, came home and crashed for 3 hours, best 3 hours of sleep I've had in a long long time. Went back to church and called up the Burke's to have them come and help with what was left of the cleanup, which took about 15 minutes... mostly just carrying things back. Went back to the Burke's to mooch some dinner and watched a couple movies before heading home and sleeping another 9 hours. I think I'm caught up, and so far, I've been keeping this cold on the sidelines... although he keeps yelling to the coach "put me in the game!"