Ow.

Last night we led worship for ATC, IHOP's youth camp. We have a mixed team of IHOPpers and Radiants, and we did all cover worship songs, except You are Holy. It was good, and weird. For one thing, I am paranoid because IHOP is such a different culture and they have certain ways they do things, which make perfect sense when you are sustaining worship 24 hours a day for the last TEN years. It's just intimidating for me to step in with relatively little knowledge of how it works around here. (the MOG, on the other hand, has learned how to fit his spazzy self into the "model" and has a blast)

The other reason is that we are wearing in-ear monitors, aka "the devil". In-ears are kind of like ear buds, but you have to CRAM THEM WAY DOWN INTO YOUR EARS. Now, I have never been accused of having small ears. In fact, I remember Stevey Ellis clearly asking if I could fly with my ears in third or fourth grade. They stick out. The smallness issue is inside said ears. I don't have a lot of space, and so I have to wedge the hard plastic molds into my whole ear canal, causing pain and suffering and emotional damage. THEN I have to plug it into a monitor control thingy connected to a music stand, and I am forevermore tethered to said music stand with cords hanging down my legs. It's a little distracting, what with the shooting pains in my ears and the cords underfoot and then my monitor got a short. So I would have very, very quiet rock and roll worship followed by a WAVE of sound directly to the brain. Ouch.

I like floor monitors, and amplifiers, and drums with only a little drum shield and not a private cottage. I like STAGE noise and CROWD noise and such. So that was a bit of an obstacle.

(disclaimer: none of this is a criticism of IHOP. It's merely a rocker's lament, my dear KC friends)

It ended up being great, the kids were awesome. I remembered how much I love teenagers.

We have not started packing yet. The end.