A few years ago, I was annoyed at a friend about something kind of stupid and when I explained the situation to my friend Katie, what she told me gave me great perspective and was exactly what I needed to hear. She told me, yes the situation had become sucky for me, but it was probably exactly what I would’ve done in the same situation and didn’t make it wrong. That something could simultaneously be both sucky for me and the right decision was not exactly something I naturally put together, but it was exactly what I needed to hear and try to understand in that moment.
This week, her words come back to me as something I needed to hear yet again. After almost two years, and four auditions, I’m not on the worship team at church anymore. That’s really hard to say because it hurts deeply and makes me very sad. It’s why I haven’t really told anybody about it, haven’t brought it up, haven’t wanted to talk about it. It makes me sad that I’ve lost a community that has meant more than I can actually explain. It makes me sad that I don’t get to be a part of a team that is moving forward into something great. It’s really hard that after years of sometimes crippling anxiety with being in the front of a church and singing, I’ve finally moved to a place of comfort, only to have that place taken from me. It’s painful that something that has connected me with church since almost before I can remember, since I sat up at the organ with Aunt Sue after she finished playing Sunday service, isn’t an option for me now.
And the natural human part of me wants to be angry about it, to blame the new leadership, to say that they didn’t know what they were doing, that it’s not fair, and that I wouldn’t want to be a part of something that doesn’t want me and would treat me so shabbily. None of those things would be true.
Just because it’s hard for me, painful for me, sucky for me, it doesn't necessarily mean that I get to say angry, frustrated, reactionary things about the leadership, their decision, or what’s going on as the team changes. It doesn’t necessarily make it wrong that I’m not on the team anymore. I’m excited to be a part of a church that is growing and moving forward with the worship—I just thought I would get to be a part of that growth in a different way.
But I do wonder, what is my response? I’ve learned a few things about my self in the past few years, and one of them is, I’m pretty solution oriented. Give me a problem and I want to find a solution for it. So if not making it on the worship team is the problem, then the obvious solutions are before me—complain bitterly and allow a wedge to be driven—this would be based on a lie, but this would be the easiest thing for me. The next easiest would be to place this on myself—to take on the identify that I’m not good enough, that I was cut, that I was not worthy, not appreciated, and that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.
It’s actually harder for me to put that one down. It may have something to do with the fundamental evaluation that is inherent in auditions, and being turned down is fundamentally evaluative. But it’s not that I’m not good enough. It’s that my voice is not where it would need to be for this team to move forward. And since music has been a part of me since before I can remember, that’s also pretty hard to hear, but it doesn’t quite strike me to my core. And it has the advantage of being true.
So that leaves me with a few other options. One is to re-audition in the fall as I was invited to do. But considering the feedback I was given and the things that would need to happen, I can already feel that music, which has always been a simple joy for me, would become work. And I don’t know that I wouldn’t always feel like a second class citizen, always worried that my voice would again slip below the line of acceptable. Neither of those things seem terribly desirable.
So one option remains, and that’s to simply and peacefully walk away from being a part of the worship team. The Christian in me who’s well-read in such matters knows that I should say that i’m excited to see what God has in store for me next and knows that my future at DC Metro Church holds something great. But I’m not quite ready to say that yet. I’m not quite ready to jump into serving on another team to cover up the hurt. I’m not quite ready to think about where else I want to serve. Kids might be a natural choice, since I know they need help and I know I’m good with kids. But I also know that my kiddos take a lot out of me all day and I don’t know that I have enough left over to give something good on Sunday mornings. I’ve never not been a part of one of those two ministries, and I’m not sure exactly where else I fit.
So I’m going to take the next month to sometimes feel sad about it—not to wallow in it, but to accept it—and I’m going to go to Pennsylvania and Oregon and California and when I come back in August, maybe then I’ll be ready to say and do those things and mean them truthfully. And when I do maybe it will be a little less sucky and a little less hard and hurt a little less. But even if it doesn’t quite feel good yet, it doesn’t necessarily make what’s happening wrong.
