My heart will chose to say....

You give and take away, You give and take away
My heart will chose to say, Lord, blessed be Your name

This is the tag line in Matt Redman's song Blessed Be Your Name. We've sung this song so many times in our church but today it took on a whole new meaning for me. This will probably sound weird but, today I lost one of my best friends.... No it wasn't a person but a thing.... My guitar. Not just any guitar you see, this was the guitar that has been with me in my journey in becoming a worship leader. It was a Larrivee D-03 with a L.R. Baggs dual source pickup.... I called it Larry. Anyway... someone broke into our church sometime last night and took a few things from our sanctuary.... A Fender American Deluxe Strat, a full set of symbols, a snare drum and of course Larry.

I was pretty upset this morning but at the same time not really. I can't really explain it but I had a peace about the whole thing. I found out about it when I was leading worship for the High School group at our church with my other guitar during first service. You see I lead worship for the second service at our church called The Elevation Service and the stuff that was stolen was all used for that service. So we quickly scrambled and found some instruments to do the service with and tried to go on with the service like nothing ever happened. The worship this morning was amazing.... I'm not saying that because I'm the worship leader or anything but I believe that God really used that whole thing for His Glory. We were a band of broken people worshiping God putting aside the things that were going on in our lives.

The last song we sang this morning was Blessed Be Your Name and when we got to that line above I felt like God was saying "Don't worry Victor, I gave it to you remember. I gave it to you to worship me and you're doing that without it."

What can I say to that? "Lord, Blessed Be Your Name!!!"

Thank You Lord for showing that to me this morning..... Blessed be Your name.

See ya Larry!

-Vic