The Loneliness of Leadership
Leadership is lonely. It is fulfilling, exciting, and wonderful…but it’s lonely. I remember before I started leading the bands, I went on a trip with one of the worship leaders who was taking us to a church a couple hours away. We all piled in the car for a road trip…I was coming along as a back-up vocalist as well as to lead a couple of songs–since I was starting to do more of that. This was very shortly before I began leading the worship team…so God was preparing me in many ways. We got to the house we were going to sleep at (the people who lived there were gone, leaving us a five bedroom mansion all to ourselves!) and me, being the only girl, got the giant master bedroom to myself! There are just some times when being a girl just rocks! I went into the giant room to go to sleep and I sat there on the bed. I have had a couple of moments in my life that have been real significant “God moments”, as my pastor likes to call them. This was one of them. I wasn’t sad about anything, but suddenly the vastness of the empty space I occupied by myself overwhelmed me. I started to cry and just suddenly felt so alone. I felt God speaking to me…I felt Him say: “The path you are about to go down is going to be lonely. I am calling you to leadership and this is your path, but it will be lonely.” Wow. Bummer huh? Read More »
Is Lost really, well, Lost?
Sometimes life feels a little bit like the TV show Lost. Yes, yet another time I see God speaking through a television show…it’s just how I roll. The show goes through a period of time in a number of characters’ lives, and all the crazy things that happen when they get stranded on a time-and-space jumping, monster-infected, hallucinogenic, sci-fi kind of island. There are so many things that have been going on in the show’s six seasons, that it sort of begs the question: Has the creator of the show had this all planned out from the beginning, and does this all fit together in some sort of cosmic plot? Or does he just make it up as he goes along, with nothing really having a deeper meaning? There are times in life when it feels like I may have entered one of the unplanned episodes of Lost. Times when I feel like maybe, just maybe I’m crazy to think that things all fit together.
Be Yourself…Really.
I like to wear weird stuff. I love fashion, I love clothes, and I love creating outfits that make some people go: “what are you wearing??” I remember when I started on staff at my church after I had been asked to be the full time worship leader…I was driving home from the church and suddenly I started to panic. I don’t dress normally. I don’t listen to mainstream Christian music. I am one of those people who gets told very frequently that I am “unique.” (I never know if that’s a compliment or not…) I started to freak out and think that I needed to change how I dressed, what I listened to, and basically, when you break it down: I felt like I needed to be someone I am not.
Okay, I had a REALLY bad day.
This is kind of hilarious, because if you’ve read the other post, “I had a bad day”, you’re going to think that I have a lot of bad days. Especially that I have lots of bad Sundays. The funny thing is that I have hardly had any really bad Sundays…it’s just the past two have been particularly difficult. So back to my really bad day. It was legendary…the kind of Sunday that will always live on in the annals of time, whether it’s in staff meetings when we discuss past funny stories of things going wrong, or if it’s me talking to new worship leaders and encouraging them in the good stuff and the hard stuff. Pretty much everything that could go wrong, did. My job is not strictly “worship pastor”…it’s more like everything that happens on Sunday mornings, PR, and other events that welcome in new people to the church, so some Sundays can be crazy since I’m not just leading worship, I’m doing some coordinating as well. Most of the time it’s fine, but last Sunday, well, it just kind of all went south. It was epic.
Calluses
This one goes out to all you (especially girls) out there just starting to learn to play the guitar. Ouch. I am so very sorry for what you are about to experience. Before I picked up guitar, I played flute and piano, and nothing, nothing hurt me like the guitar. I have girly hands. Really skinny super long fingers, that have been referred to as “bony” in the past. Yep, skeletor hands, that’s me. Not only do I have girly hands, but I’m also, well, a girl, obviously. That means, yes you guessed it, LOTION. I have no idea what the statistics are on how much lotion girls use compared to guys, but I would guess it’s in the 2,000 gallons more range. I think most girly girls are about half lotion and hand cremes. So when I started playing guitar, I had no idea what was coming. I heard that you develop calluses, then you are fine. What I hadn’t heard is that it takes like four years for this to happen, and if you are a girly girl, maybe longer. Oh man…every time I would begin to see a callus forming, out came the lotion and off came the callus. I mean what am I supposed to do?? Stop using lotion and have man hands? (no offense to you guys, your hands are very nice.) I wasn’t trying to get rid of them–I desperately wanted to keep them–it would just happen on its own.
I learned to play through pain. Pain like sharp needles jabbing through my fingers…praying hard that the pastor would wrap up his prayer soon so I could finish. One time I was so tired of the pain that for band practice I put tiny pieces of duck tape on the tips of my fingers. If there was some second-skin like product out there, like super glue or something, man that would make a fortune with new guitar players. Finally I got some real calluses on my fingers, probably like five or six years after starting to play regularly, but even now there are times when it gets uncomfortable.
My faithful wooden friend
I love my guitar. I wish there was a bumper sticker that said: I (heart) My Guitar, because if there was, I would buy it. My guitar chose me, not the other way around. You know in Harry Potter when he goes to choose a wand, and they wand maker tells him: “the wand chooses the wizard”, well, that’s my theory on guitars. The guitar chooses the musician. To call myself a musician at the time I bought my guitar is kind of an overstatement…I mean, singing is always my first love, and I had played piano for years, so I guess I was a musician. But not when it came to guitar playing.
I learned guitar because it was more portable than a piano, and you can actually sing with it unlike a harmonica. (although when I’m lugging around the guitar and all the gear, I envy those harmonica players…) I learned on my dad’s jumbo-sized Takimine and liked it just fine, but I definitely needed my own guitar so that I wasn’t taking his every time I needed to play. I worked all summer my first year in college and didn’t spend a penny of it. Okay, you don’t know me, so I need to tell you how big that is. I like to spend money, like, all of it. The merits of saving up are lost on me, so for me to do this basically was God-mandated, and because I really felt like it was time to buy a guitar. I decided to go look at Taylor guitars in all price ranges. I don’t feel limited by prices of things, because I feel like if it’s the right thing, God will provide. I’m a Taylor girl through and through. I’m not saying they are better than other guitars, they aren’t, but I never met a Taylor I didn’t like. My dad, always the comparison shopper, and a Martin guy at that, told me I needed to look at everything…which of course I balked at since I knew I was destined to have a Taylor.
So you wanna be a worship leader?
“I want to be a worship leader, how do I do it?” I hear this question a lot. I mean one time (weird story alert!) I even had a woman approach me and ask me to lay hands on her and pray for her to be anointed as a worship leader in the women’s restroom. Thankfully at that point everyone had already finished washing their hands! I have struggled with this question a lot because my path was so odd. If you’ve read the About Me post, you know that I didn’t start out wanting to do this. I started out thinking that I was going to do my own thing and never even thought about leading worship until I was asked. So needless to say, I can’t tell people: “here’s how I did it, you can do the same.” Except as I’ve thought about it and looked back over the path God has taken me on, I realize I kind of can. No one’s path is the same, and yours will be unique to you and the call God has placed on your life. You may not like my answer to this question, but these are the things I wish I could tell every person who comes to church with leadership gifting.
I Had A Bad Day
I was having a really bad day last Sunday. I mean, the kind of day where you wake up defensive and ready to rumble with the first person who says more than just “hi how are you?” If you are a worship leader, or work at a church, you know that these Sundays just happen. I hadn’t slept well, I had worked myself too hard throughout the week, and I was struggling to get my attitude in the right spot to lead worship. Nothing makes you feel worse on a Sunday morning when you are supposed to lead people into the presence of God than a crappy attitude…after the crabbiness comes guilt and inadequacy, the enemy coming at you telling you that you are a horrible person and aren’t fit for duty.
Communication…it’s not just for you
Recently I had an awkward situation where someone had forgotten to communicate something really important to me at the church I work at. Just so happened that the person who forgot was my lead pastor. I was feeling really low to have to hear about this thing that was directly related to my job from someone else, who isn’t even on staff. I was feeling terrible…like really feeling hurt and confused. When this type of situation arises (and believe me, it will at any church or any job for that matter), there is a choice to be made. First option: stuff it inside, interpret it how you like, and try to move past it…try to “forgive and forget” like Jesus would, but since we are not Jesus, we will most likely really just end up stuffing it inside and saving it for later. Second option: talk to him about it…find out what really happened, and tell him how you feel. For most non confrontational people (like me) the first option sounds best. It feels like the option that is most Christ-like…I mean, you don’t want to rock the boat, to cause drama, to waste his precious time…your lead pastor’s time is very precious and you know how much he has to deal with on a daily basis. I chose option number two, and I want to suggest that you do the same.
Yet Another TV Revelation
God spoke to me again through TV. You are probably thinking I’m a TV addict, but I grew up without it pretty much, so I have years of television culture to catch up on! I was watching a show where a girl who had been abandoned by her father was reunited with him in adulthood. She had become successful and self sufficient, and he, who had willingly walked out on her years before, re-entered her life and suddenly started trying to build a relationship with her. He was trying to get close to her, so he got a job at the same place she worked at…much to her dismay. As happy as she was to find her father, she had kept him at arms length since his return. In the show, she goes to a psychologist friend and tells him that she wants him to get fired so that she won’t have to work with him anymore. He said to her: “you don’t want him to work with you because having him back in your life makes you feel like you did when you were young…it makes you fearful that he will walk out of your life again and hurt you once more.” Read More »
About...
Katy Carnohan is a worship pastor, a songwriter, a through and through Californian, an untrained makeup artist, a collector of fashion, who pretty much has an opinion about everything.