Project X #13

According to superstition, this is our unlucky Project X. I’m not real sure how this could be unlucky. Oh well.

This past week was a busy one at Crossroads. A very good kind of busy. Each day my to-do list was as long as it ever had been, but things got done.

To start off, Tuesday was entirely spent in meetings. Actually, just 2 meetings. Yeah, only 2 meetings took up literally my entire day. The first one was our all staff meeting. While it was long, and it usually is, it was also great. We started off telling each other stories of the past month. It was really cool to hear all the great stuff that’s going on in people’s lives at Crossroads. I got to tell a story that Jesse, one our lighting volunteers told me. He was telling us about his mom’s experience at Crossroads. She came to church one Sunday and told Jesse, “It was like I was back at the same place I spent my Saturday night.” That was so cool to hear because that’s exactly what I want people to walk away feeling like every weekend. It’s the reason we program lights, have the band, and play the music we do. We want people to feel like it’s a place they can be comfortable. Let’s be honest, most people are much more comfortable at a rock concert than they are at church, so we make the church look like a rock concert!

The other meeting was our service programming meeting. It was good to get to hash out some ideas for our next series in August. Yeah, we’re still behind where we want to be, and right now we see no signs of getting ahead like we want to be. But some of those things are out of our control right now(emphasis on right now). It was good too because for the first time that I can think of, we made a decision, although not everyone may have liked it, but when the meeting was over, we all knew we were running with that decision. That felt really good. Usually, if a decision is made and not everyone is down with it, it usually gets brought back up later and things get kind of ugly. But I didn’t get that feeling at all this past week. It’s good because it shows that our team is really moving forward as a real team.

After that, I spent most of my time getting ready for our 4th of July “Gril ‘n Chill”. We’re having a tailgating party at the church this Sunday evening and watching fireworks. We’re having some music playing and doing a hot dog eating contest and a couple other things, so I had to get a small sound system ready. Although it is relatively small, there’s still a lot of parts to it. Luckily, the speakers and one of the mixers were already in the same room together, along with a couple of the cables I need. The hardest part really was finding extension cables for power, that were the length we need. I found one easily, but then had to spend an hour looking for more. When I found some, they were really tangled up, so I had to take time to untangle them. Then I had to go find a couple other cables that weren’t where they should have been, but oh well.

One thing that I was able to cross off my “project list” was fixing the angle of our projectors in the main auditorium. We’ve done a lot of work in there and had to continually cover and uncover the projectors with plastic bags and such. So I think that in the process of doing so, they got knocked around a little bit. It took some time to get them right, including changing the zoom and position as well as just angles, but they look great now. One of them was so bad off, lyrics to songs and scripture for the message would be cut off right at the end sometimes. And there was about a 5 inch gap between the frame and where the edge of the picture actually was on one screen. But again, now they are fixed and look great.

The best part of the week, was getting everything ready for Sunday before Thursday. Usually, there’s a couple things I’m having to do last minute on Thursdays because I need to get graphics and things like that from other people. But this week, we had everything ready Wednesday. That was really nice.

But that was basically it. Nothing to terribly exciting, but necessary nonetheless.