I love my new job. I don’t think I have ever loved a job before like I love this job.

But today was one crazy day!

We’ll ordain 29 new deacons a week from Sunday, and I’ve been trying to get ahead of the game by designing an order-of-worship sheet that features full-color pictures of all the candidates and their families (who are also making a big commitment!). I pulled a proof two weeks ago of it, and haven’t been able to convince the color copier/printer to do another color duplex since.

I needed it to do lots more than one today, so we could have copies of the new Seniors Class (retired folks) newsletter ready to hand out at the Open House – a grand opening event – for our brand new Family Life Center this Sunday evening.

We had to settle for printing them in black and white on a different copier/printer.

My worship planning team for this month (who are usually weeks ahead of the game) had last-minute changes and a surprise today as I assembled the worship visuals and hymn slides for Sunday. They had created a lovely PowerPoint timed to the song Let Us Be You from the new ZOE Group CD, In Christ Alone. Unfortunately, our worship software (EasyWorship) doesn’t import and play embedded sound from PowerPoints. So I cobbled together a quick solution: queue up the song in Windows Media Player and then click the PowerPoint to go live.

The person who has been running the worship software during both Sunday morning services and the evening service for years asked this week to be replaced, but graciously agreed to continue through the end of the month.

Then people kept dying. Actually they died earlier in the week, but we just heard about two of them late today, and I wanted to get their information into the order of worship sheet, which I had held off printing until getting confirmation on all the worship leaders. Fortunately, this week’s order-of-worship only needed to be done on the black-and-white copier/printer. (We had trouble with it earlier in the week. I suggested either an exorcism or laying our hands on it in prayer before I ran the 1,054 copies of the church bulletin!)

Did I mention that it all had to be done tonight, because my family and I are leaving town with another family of dear friends tomorrow morning to go see a Christmas dinner show in Branson, Missouri? We’ve been talking with them about doing it for years, and now that we’ve finally committed to it, it’s on the weekend when at least one something is so likely to go wrong.

Will I have faith to get in the car and go tomorrow, and trust God’s hand to work His will in my absence? Yeah.

Will I fret about it most of the way up there, while there, and back? Probably.

Will I ever learn to turn things like this completely over to God and stop worrying about them? I hope so.

But the crazy days make it harder!