"In the Sanctuary"

Today, something really cool happened- God shocked us all! Joey & I overslept and left a little late. But Joey drove to church, so we pulled into the parking lot at 8:15, right on time. As we are passing the sanctuary to park in the back lot of the church, there were a whole bunch of choir/orchestra people standing outside- very odd. My first thought was "are we locked out?" but the doors to the church were open, so that was a no. Then Joey said "I think we have no power." Sure enough, when we walked up the hill, we discovered the church had no power. The power was out for a couple square miles around the church too. We still don't know why, but it was. So it is 8:15 and we have a 9:00 service. So, we are waiting for the pastors to make a decision on what we are going to do. Not having service was, of course, not an option. So the plan changed about four time in three minutes, but the final plan was to have church outside in the parking lot. This presents a few problems for us, namely finding all of the things we need (chairs, music stands, sound equipment, etc) in the dark. Our sanctuary has no windows in it...so this was very difficult. Thankfully, we had some flashlights and were able to prop doors open to get some light. A man who attends the church brought a generator for us to use and we set up a pretty full sound system for the service in the parking lot. It was cool to see everything come together. In the span of about 20 minutes, we went from a parking lot to a sanctuary, including about 400 or so chairs, choir risers, a sound system and an orchestra pit. It was amazing.

Our choir special today was a song called "In the Sanctuary." It basically says we will praise God in the sanctuary because He's worthy of our praises. The cool thing, to me, is that because we couldn't be in the "sanctuary" for worship, God seemed to be telling us that a sanctuary isn't just a building where we meet to "do church." A sanctuary is the place where God's people gather to worship Him. It was great to be outside with trees around us, worshipping God in His sanctuary.

God was good to us. There was a wonderful cloud cover, a gentle breeze and cool temperatures this morning, all kind of rare in June in the south. But it made for a wonderful service. By the end of service, power had been restored and we had the 11:00 service in the building, but I think it was a great lesson to be learned.

I'm so thankful to serve a God who uses all of our situations to teach us things. This was a big God thing for us today. For a church of our size to be "inconvenienced" and made to think on our feet like we did, it was so God. I'm glad the power company had a problem this morning :-)

Blessings!