Blast from the past
So I'm looking through my old LiveJournal archives today to see what my life was like a year ago and I stumbled upon I think what was my first ever conversation and memory of JJ. It's kind of funny because it's all in conjunction with helping to run tech for WAM (back when I definitely didn't know how to do a thing) and so I refer to JJ kind of coldly as "the sound guy." Take a read from Decemeber 7, 2003: This morning at newhope was PURE CHAOS. 7:30 am we get there and cart the stuff in. It's time for Christmas services which means lots of pretty decorations. But lots of pretty decorations means .... lots of extra work. And lots of extra work means ... things running behind etc. etc. But it turned out mostly pretty good. At about 9:50 (service starts at 10) we discovered two things 1) that Oz was apparently going to sing which meant that 2) we had no one to run lights. Guess who got to run lights on about 7 minutes notice? Me. Guess who has, up until this morning, never even TOUCHED a light board in her life? Me. Guess who, by the grace of God and J.J. talking me through the service, managed to not screw it up ... well, screw it up too badly anyway. Me. The feeling I had when the worship team started playing this morning was someone picking me up and tossing me into the fire. After my heartrate came down from lactate-set speed to about warm-up speed and I was breathing like a normal human being again I realized that the service this morning was nothing short of a miracle. God is GOOD. Awesome. Seriously, afterward J.J. (the sound guy) and I were talking and really without God, at 10 am this morning we would have been like "Um, yeah, we're not ready for the service yet - come back at 10:30." Wow. Two things about this entry. (1) I never ever refer to Steve as "Oz" anymore. I just call him Steve. He actually introduces himself to people as Oz, but I still call him Steve. He doesn't look like an "Oz" he looks like a "Steve." In my opinion. (2) I remember after this service I was totally frazzled and when I came down from the light booth I got a half a hug (you know the kind I'm talking about, the man-hug that's like half an arm, half a squeeze) from JJ. That was probably the first time I actually spoke to him as JJ and not as "that guy who runs the big piece of equipment down front." This was archived on December 7th. The next time I mention JJ is February 28th as I had my first sound training session with him on the 27th and the exact reference was "I did go to WAM rehearsal and learn cool stuff about running sound, which was also fun, and I got to hang out with JJ who taught me to run sound, and that was fun, and I got to hang out, albeit all too briefly, with Agora at BW3 for dinner, which was also fun." Did I really go 2 1/2 months without mentioning him at all? This sort of thing highly amuses me. It's a trip down very short memory lane.