This week is the Passion Week.  On Good Friday, we will center in on Christ and the cross and spend some extended time there in worship.  I’m so excited about our service that I found myself tingling with anticipation and watery-eyed as I walked through it with the worship band at our rehearsal.  I love crafting a worship service, bringing all of the involved people together, rehearsing, anticipating, praying, and finally experiencing it with the body of Christ.  I sense God’s pleasure as I agonize over who and what and when and how.  Easter is no different, although a bigger collaboration.  We had an incredible band rehearsal on Monday.  I get to rehearse all of the elements tomorrow night with my Worship Planning Team.  I especially appreciated the prayer times that I have had with people as we approach this very important day of worship.  I love to hear God’s people express their hearts for God and his people, including those who have yet to become God’s people.  Our prayer time as a pastoral staff was particularly encouraging yesterday as we paused to pray for our Easter worship services and those who will come to meet with God.  There is something beautiful about the unity of heart, mind and soul that comes from corporate prayer together – when all eyes are looking to God with the same purpose.

God has taught me a lot about prayer over the past year.  I have come from a place of believing in prayer, but having a weak practice of it to a place of deep faith in God, expressed through the practice of it.  I will never be satisfied with how often or well I pray, but it is becoming more and more central to my life and is making me a more dependent child upon my Heavenly Father.  That is a good thing.  It is also making me more watchful as I wait with the assurance that God will move in answer to these prayers.  I think it is happening corporately with our church family as well, and that just makes me smile and anticipate the wonderful works God is about to do in and through us.