So There I Was…
So there I was, a couple of Sundays ago, playing the piano and helping lead worship at church. I had accidentally slept in my contacts the night before. I usually don’t do this but, for some reason, that Saturday night I went to bed with them in. I discovered at 4:00 am, as I was fumbling on my nightstand for my glasses so I could go to the bathroom ,that I could actually see the numbers on my alarm clock. But..I digress.
So, there I was playing the piano, very dry eyed, with my glasses on that Sunday. It was the Sunday after our worship leader came back from taking a week off because of her young nephew’s tragic death. When it came to the time where Pat reads a scripture she had decided to read a journal entry from her nephew’s little prayer journal dated a few days before he died. It was a beautiful and eerie post that almost felt like he knew what was coming. Pat got a little emotional reading this and I could feel my eyes welling with tears. But I was ok. I didn’t start any uncontrollable crying which I am prone to do during song time. You would think that a little tear moisture for my very dry eyes would have been a good thing. It wasn’t. My eyes started burning. Like they were. On.Fire. As we tried to sing our special number for the offertory my eyes started pouring tears and my nose started gushing. I could barely keep my eyes open. I was blinking like mad and trying to look out one eye and then the other. As long as I could keep one eye open I could see my music and play. With all the blinking and squinting I thought for sure everyone was going to think I was having some sort of seizure. I was hoping since I had worn my glasses they were covering my face a bit and no one would notice the water works coming from my eyes and nose.
Do you know how hard it is to play and sing when you can barely see your music through blurry, burning eyes and you have snot running into your mouth? I wish I didn’t.
And the only thing I was thinking was ” I WANT YOU ALL TO KNOW I’M NOT REALLY CRYING!! I’M NOT CRYING BECAUSE YET ANOTHER SONG HAS MADE ME TOO EMOTIONAL TO SING! OH NO,NOT THIS TIME. MY EYES ARE JUST ON FIRE. THAT’S ALL!!”
So no one other than my friend, Jen, ended up saying anything or acted like they noticed. She said she saw that I was having a little “issue” and she was trying to figure out if I was just getting emotional or if something else was wrong.
“Ha!” I said. ” I wasn’t really crying.….”
And you know the rest of the story.
