Continuing from My Freedom to Succeed (which was a loose continuation of My Freedom to Experiment) I’m going to finally conclude these series of posts.

Today, I’m going to talk about My Freedom to Fail.

Basically what I mean by that is that I’m not perfect.
I make mistakes.
I screw up.
And it’s okay.

This doesn’t just apply to work at Coast, but even my personal life.

I don’t always make the right decisions.
Sometimes I make bad call.
Or a bonehead move.
Or even just plain screw up.
If When I do mess up, I had better learn from it and not do it again.

Now don’t get me wrong, I strive to be great at what I do. I really hate failing.

Take this past weekend for example…

Mike was out-of-town. He got to spend the weekend at the Murrieta Hot Springs. Sounds nice, right? I’m sure it would have been if it wasn’t the Women’s Retreat where there were 135 women. When he got back I asked if he’d gotten his nails done while he was there

Okay, back to the story… Mike was gone so that left me to “hold down the fort” so-to-speak all weekend. It was also the second weekend for one of our new audio volunteers. I felt bad for him. It was a rough weekend to try to train someone new.

I’m not gonna lie, I was stressed. It’s a lot of pressure to pull off what we do every week. I’m just glad that the success of failure of it doesn’t rest on me. It was only by God’s strength that I got through it!

And a big shout-out to our two lighting volunteers for coming in and setting all the floor lights again after having them disconnected and moved during the construction on the stage this week. You guys are awesome and I am so blessed to be able to work with both of you!!

Being the only audio guy there has really made me appreciate the processes that Mike and I have put in place to make our jobs easier. From being able to remote into any machine in the tech booth using the iPad to being able to power all the amps from one location, having Reaper start recording automatically (though there was a small hiccup on Sunday with the recording) and the libraries in the M-48′s. All of that has made pulling off a weekend service so much easier.

Now on a normal weekend where it’s just Mike and I, we can do setup and line-check in under an hour. If we have a third person we’re around 30-45 minutes. This past weekend with all the extra work and the new volunteer, it took us almost two full hours. We literally got done line-checking just as the band was rolling in.

As I said, I was stressed. I tried to stay calm and breathe and had text a close friend to pray that I would make it through. The worst thing would have been if I started snapping at people or lost my cool. I mean, really, what does that accomplish? It just makes everyone uneasy and can ruin the whole weekend.

By God’s grace I kept my cool and we got everything set and ready.

Once the band rolled in we had a couple minor changes. Nothing big. But again, me being in the booth and having to run down the stage takes time.

During sound-check, one small glitch cropped up that needed me to fix it which meant I had to hot-foot it down to the stage. Thank you, Mike, for leaving the iPad!! It saved my bacon a few times this weekend. After getting the glitch worked out, and thanks to the iPad, I managed to finish up sound-check and get all the gains set properly from down on the stage floor. And with the ability to remote into the Roland machine I could make adjustments to the musician’s mixes as well.

Mark needs a vocalist panned? No problem!
Need more piano in a wedge? Got ya covered!

Once rehearsal started I finally felt like I could breathe again. The band was doing their thing and I just needed to pay attention and build my snapshots. Again, I was mixing and building everything from the comfort of a chair in row H.

I’ll be honest though, I was struggling to get everything to sit pretty in the mix. I went home that night feeling discouraged about how it sounded. I just wasn’t happy with it. Not sure if it was the combination of stress and anxiety with everything going on, but I couldn’t sleep. My eyes were closed, but that was about all. I figured I had gotten somewhere in the neighborhood of three and a half hours of sleep. The next morning was going to be a lot of fun…

After swinging by Starbucks and getting my favorite iced beverage, the Iced Carmel Macchiato with extra caramel, I starting setting out all the wireless mics and IEM packs for the musicians. Once I had gotten the system powered on and everything up and running again, the band started warming up and going through their songs.

They hadn’t gotten 30 seconds into Forever Reign before Mark stops and calls up saying that John’s electric guitar was way louder now and he didn’t have any control over the volume. I had John play and checked the levels but they were in the same place as they were the night before. After spending a few minutes diagnosing and resetting the M-48′s it hit me. I got on the talkback mic and asked Mark and John to check their IEM packs. Mark should be on “A” and John on “B”. Sure enough, they were swapped. My bad!

Now I want to make a point here.

This isn’t to say how great I am. Quite the contrary. This shows that I make mistakes. Even simples ones. We all do. We’re all human. I believe it’s how we respond that matters. I could have blamed someone else. Or blamed the gear. Or done anything to make it look like it wasn’t my fault. But you know what? It was my fault. I owned my mistake. By owning up to a mistake, the band or pastor or speaker or fill in the blank will respect you more and trust you more. Just don’t let it become a regular occurrence!

After my little SNAFU the band finished going through their set and we were ready to start!

We even nailed our timings with the walk-in music.
(P.S. This weekend I rocked Ethan Hulse‘s new EP, I Don’t Feel Simple. I thought it went perfectly with the mood for the weekend.)

I don’t know what happened, but we had a lot of people for the 9am service and they were into it! Numerous times I looked down to the audience and saw hands raised and people singing along. The band was doing a phenomenal job and I was happy with the way things were sounding. Towards the end of the service I had even received a text from Mike telling me he had gotten a text message from one of the musicians who was off today saying that he liked the mix and was wondering who was running FOH today. That made me feel good. I know we’re not here to please everybody. We’re here to please and audience of one: God. But I think that God speaks through these people and I felt really blessed to be a part of this team.

Mike even told me that with the positive comments I heard, that’s God’s way of saying, “Hang in there!”

It’s true. I needed to hear that.

I really made sure that since Ken wasn’t speaking and since Mike was away, that the mix didn’t turn into how I’d want it to sound. You know how little I’d be trusted to mix again if that had happened? Instead, I made sure to mix it to the standards that have been set but still being able to add a little of my own creativity into it.

All in all, it was a great learning experience for me. And only by God’s grace (and the amazing tech team) that we got through the weekend without anything going horribly wrong.

Even though it was stressful and it wasn’t perfect I still saw lives changed by God. I know of two people who had never stepped foot in our building before who will be coming back again next weekend. That’s huge!!

If you honestly think that your service has to be 100% perfect every single time in order for God to move, then we serve an awfully small God. I serve a God that is bigger than I am and isn’t dependent on me to carry out His will. To use the analogy from Ryan‘s message this weekend: I just have to be willing to be used. I’m just the arrow in His quiver.

-i