Nicaragua Diary, Day 33

I preached yesterday.  It went well, thank God.

Before I preached, I had a first.  

I’ve been preaching for a long time now.  I’ve had a flat tire when I needed for church.  I’ve been pulled over on the way to church.  I’ve left my zipper down and had my wife point it out right before I went up for the sermon.  I’ve had a printer fail to produce my sermon manuscript and gone without.*  I’ve misnumbered my manuscript pages, spilled water on them, had the wind blow them all off my lectern.   

I’ve jettisoned the sermon I’d written and preached on something else entirely, on the spot, I believe at God’s prompting.  

And fairly recently, I all but face planted while walking up to preach.  

So I start to imagine that I’m running out of new experiences for what can go wrong or make those last, already-nauseating moments right beforehand even more exciting.  

At International Christian Fellowship, we have headset mics.  They work pretty well.  I always struggle to put them on right.  It’s just one of those things. One of my worst preaching experiences–not at ICF–I put the headset on wrong and spent the entire sermon tugging it back down while the mic tried to climb up my temple.  So I’m always a little nervous to get them on correctly.  Even though I’ve put them on a bunch of times, I always get them on wrong at first and then I’m wrestling with them and trying to adjust them. 

Consequently, I’ve stopped using the men’s restroom in the auditorium where we meet to make these adjustments/have this wrestling match because I’ve learned that a)it always happens, b)having other guys walking in and out, watching me, maybe saying, “Good luck up there, you’ll need it,” does not, in fact, calm my nerves.

Instead, I grab my wife’s keys–ICF meets at our school–and head to the administration building where I can let myself in, have a restroom all to myself, take as long as necessary to put my mic on wrong then relearn how to put it on correctly, and triple check my zipper.  I usually go during the offering song so  that I can hear the progress, plus we’ll have another song before the sermon, the one we sing while the kids are racing off to their Sunday school classes.  

One final detail:  Kim’s keys are on a long, red loop string, basically a shoelace with six keys on it and no ends.  An eternal circle.  

I had the keys and the headset in my hand, I was hurrying to unlock the admin door, and just then I noticed that the key string had somehow closed in a perfect knot on the headset cord.  I mean beautiful, the kind of knot I could have instructions to tie and would still fail.  

Now understand, if you’ve never preached before, that the last 5-20 minutes before preaching I forget why I enjoy my calling and work very hard to keep down my breakfast.  Sometimes I feel exactly the same as when I’m on a boat on choppy water–and I’m badly prone to seasickness.  

So when I noticed this lovely knot, my reaction was not, “Hm, that’s not good, I should carefully examine this and untangle it in the exact same pattern but in reverse, because that would be a good, rational strategy.”  No, I thought, “Oh, Dang!’ and pulled on it.  The headset cord is attached to the little box you clip to your belt.  The ends of the headset cord are these flimsy little wire-and-plastic hooks that go your ears to position the mic correctly.  There is no proper end anywhere that you can just work carefully through the gnarl.  I did learn, though, that the hooks can somehow make the knot worse, since the cord runs off in two directions to meet up with them, lots of slack but nothing small enough to thread through.  

If you’ve ever fought with Christmas ornament hooks or old wire hangers, you probably know the sensation I experienced next, which is “This isn’t possible.  There isn’t enough available material to make such a huge tangle.”  Somehow the sum total of shoe lace and mic cord had tripled and most of it was now in a ball that tightened no matter which direction I pulled or pushed.

I suppose now is a good time to mention that, while God bestowed upon me the gift of gross motor skills which enable me to catch a disc and a baseball and shoot a basketball, I did not receive fine motor skills in equal abundance.  Or any abundance.  My handwriting is atrocious, I despise playing Pictionary, and art was the class I came closest to failing in grade school.  Threading a needle, for me, is the equivalent of hitting a bullseye on a dartboard from fifty yards away.**

Did I mention that I could hear the song being played back in church?  It was now half over.  I’m still standing outside the admin building, wondering with that stupid part of my brain how this will look if someone walks by.  I finally fumble for the keys so I can unlock the door and go inside to face my Gordian knot. 

Oh, yeah, one more thing.  Yesterday was the first Sunday of the month, which meant there was no Sunday school nor Sunday school dismissal song…which meant when the current song was over, I was up.  

Have you seen the movie Dunkirk?  It’s excellent, truly a work of cinematic art, in my opinion, though very violent and disturbing.  No spoilers, except this one:  the soundtrack is a masterpiece.  A ticking begins when the conflict starts and it exacerbates the tension.  I heard that ticking in the bathroom.  

Song is now nearly over, I’m seriously considering leaving Kim’s keys and this ball of disaster and just getting one of the handheld microphones, which would appear bizarre to the sound crew but perhaps slightly less bizarre than having a red shoelace keychain jingling between my chin and chest while preaching.  

Tick, tick, tick…

At this moment, with less than sixty seconds before I need to be walking up to preach, it occurs to me:  I can unplug the cord from the little box. Yes, I’ve been praying–fervently–this whole time, and yes, that thought just hit home.***

…tick, tick, tick…

The next forty-five seconds are a blur of clumsy fingers and wires and string and keys.

…tick, tick, tick..

And then somehow, the keys disentangle and fall to the floor.

…tick, tick, tick…

I’ve got maybe 15 seconds and my mic isn’t on yet.  Slam it behind my ears and hope it’s right the first time, this once.

…tick, tick, tick…

 Snake that blessed cord down through my shirt so I don’t catch it when I’m gesticulating and have it rip the headset off, like that one time.

…tick, tick, tick…

Back through the doors, last note fading, musicians just starting  to exit the stage, and I’m scooping up my Bible, manuscript, and water bottle as I stride by my seat and my kids to (don’t puke) stand up in front and, 

“Good morning.”  

 

And the sermon went really well.  God’s funny like that.  

 

 

 

*Of course, once that happened, I never left printing to the last minute ever again.  Yep.  And once I realized it was embarrassing to be late, I was never late again.  

**Okay, that’s hyperbole.  Forty.

*** In fairness to me, some of the headsets unplug and others I’ve tried but those cords would not come out for me.  They probably all unplug, but some come out so hard it feels like I’m about to rip the wires out instead of the plug, so I don’t try.