Selfconciousness

 

I’ve made something of  a goal of getting back into playing guitar semi-seriously again.  Andy T has a bunch of songs half-written that I’d like to help with but I am very shy of playing in front of people at the best of times and most definitely when I’m as far out of practice as I am.  I sat and played scales for about twenty minutes tonight.  I figure with another 6-8 weeks of steady practice I might be able to nail a simple E scale without messing it up or looking.  I forgot how much proper technique and posture hurts.

I am a fairly self-concious person a fair amount of the time.  For those of you who know me (and have seen my yell for attention in a crowded room) this may surprise you.  I’m not crippled with self-doubt (most of the time) but I am very uneasy doing something in front of people unless I’ve really worked at it.  One of the reasons I hesitated so much when we were starting to have praise teams was because I didn’t think I was good enough.  It’s interesting to me which things trouble me.  Anybody who was at the Great Lakes youth rally last April saw me in an undershirt and a pair of plaid boxer shorts ironing poptarts.  Stuff like that doesn’t faze me in the slightest.  The sillier the better.

Put me up in front of a bunch of people and ask me to present ideas I prepared in advance for something like the Lord’s supper or even a short talk at a devo and I lock right up.  It is the oddest thing.  I am the same way with leading singing by myself or playing guitar in front of people.  I’m not even sure what it is.  With the speaking thing, usually I am presenting ideas that I generated so that kind of makes sense (I’m not nervous about the speaking so much as the thought that maybe my ideas are no good).

In a related idea (the actual inspiration for this post), I’ve been looking at stuff posted to the Church Marketing Lab on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/groups/cfcc/pool/) and I am faced with the decision of whether or not to post stuff I’m working on there.  On the one hand, it would probably be valuable to get feedback from fresh eyes but on the other hand what if they don’t like my stuff?!  I’ve already finished with the current series’ title slide so I’m not going to bother posting it but I think I might work myself up to doing so with the next one.  For the curious, here is the logo I did up:

 

every calorie is a war