What we accomplished in Cairo - II

The second big thing we accomplished in Cairo is teaching and imparting. They are related, but not necessarily the same thing. As I mentioned earlier, Brian taught at the weekend services and we all taught classes at a worship conference. Brian taught on songwriting and worship. The band together, along with Terry our sound man, gave a workshop on rehearsing and playing together. We stressed the principle of One -- everything should add up to One. Too often we play like each one of us is a One and we add up to Four or Five or Six. That's a recipe for overplaying and carnage. It's essential to listen, to prefer one another, and to play together as part of a greater One. Then we broke up into smaller classes on our individual instruments, or in my case improvisation. Hopefully we gave them a lot of useful information and some fresh inspiration for the way forward.

In his teaching for the weekend worship services, Brian taught on God meeting us in and taking us through difficulties. David says in Psalm 23 that the Lord makes a table for us in the presence of our enemies and that He's with us in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Bummer.
I'd rather have the table in the presence of friends and admirers. And most of us would rather walk around the Valley and have God meet us on the other side. But life isn't like that, is it. And though we all have difficult things in life -- loss, illness, tragedy, broken relationship, financial hardship, etc -- all too often we are not able to bring our whole hearts to church, lest we threaten the collective denial that being a Christian saves us from all problems and guarantees a perfectly happy life all the time. The Bible, and the Psalms in particular paint a very different picture where godly people struggle with all of their lives before God.

Maddi Church lost their beloved senior Pastor in a tragic accident. His wife lost her husband of 30 years. Many lost a dear friend. There is no getting over that quickly. Brian has three special needs children with Fragile-X syndrome. That's part of his life from now 'till Glory. There is no easy fix -- there is walking with God in it every day. We all have stories of our own. Church should be a safe place for us to bring all of our life to the Lord -- grief included. We need some place that's safe, and God wants all of our heart, so...