ROCK STAR

How I wish I could be a rock star. There is this video of me when I was four. It has been a while since I have seen it because it is on one of those old film movies that you need a projector to watch. But in this video I’m dancing around singing “Rock and Roll, Rock and Roll, Yeah!” I would watch that and think, “this is really cool one day when I’m a rock star this will end up Entertainment Tonight.” Well, I can kinda play guitar, mostly rhythm, I’m not a very good singer, and while I’m not ugly I’m not going to end up in some band just because I’m good looking. So while my childhood dream will never be realized I have picked out pieces of the dream that I can still connect to.

I don’t know exactly what it was that at the age of four made me want to be a rock star so bad. It wasn’t that I was in preschool wishing I could be drinking JD out of the bottle and enjoying the other perks of stardom. I am sure that I would be reading too much into my post-toddler fantasy to come up with a motivation behind that dream, but I know that as I grew up the act of creating something that would affect groups of people became very attractive. I remember the first time that I was asked to speak in front of a really big group. I’m not talking raising my hand in class, or giving an announcement at youth group, I was asked to share what God had done in my life to those at a youth conference numbering 1,000. While I was a little nervous I found the experience to be electrifying. I had a number of people come up to me afterwards and tell me how it had impacted them, and it wasn’t really an ego thing, but I really enjoyed being able to affect so many people at once.

I’ve had the privilege of preaching sermons plenty of times in my life. As a youth pastor most weeks I was teaching classes and giving short messages to the students. The act of crafting and creating something that other people will listen to (hopefully) and might have an affect on their life is a sobering responsibility. It is one that I love though and I am very excited about being able to preach every week. I’ve had a few tell me this excitement will wane, and like them I will be scrambling on Saturday night to throw something together, but I don’t really see that happening. Can’t wait for this Sunday, hope it goes well.