more than guitars...

I have so much catchup blogging to do. This 3 weeks has been hard, and amazing, and beautiful. We played about a hundred times (or 20, whatever) and slept very little and were so excited to be a part of this event. I want to recap some of the places we ministered at, and especially a men's conference for guys in recovery, fresh off the streets, and then I want to tell you about theCall and the Justice March- because HOLY COW. We had 10k at theCall, and then probably 10k at the morning rally, and march, and another 4200 (some repeats) standing in silent prayer at the proposed clinic site. It was history, and I absolutely felt the historical significance as well as the spiritual significance.

So I do want to talk about all that, but right now I am overwhelmed with the loss of our stage equipment. It is so, so small in the light of what is happening in Haiti, or in light of the battle we have been engaged in. Still, it's devastating to us and it's hard to see what is next.

If you don't know, Monday morning we left the hotel for the march, when we discovered that Matt's Tahoe had been burglarized, and our equipment stolen. We called the police, but they wouldn't come out, they just wanted us to send them a report. I probably don't remember everything, but some of the stuff stolen included: both of Richy's electric guitars and his pedals, JM's pedals and custom bass guitar, both of Hannah's keyboards, a vocal processor, and some other stuff I'm not thinking of now. It's about 13k worth of equipment, and only $4000 of it is covered by insurance.

Should we have had insurance? Well, yeah. We will now. This is the first time, in 15 years of ministry, that we've had anything valuable stolen. We are reeling right now... imagine if your business burned to the ground... how do you rebuild when your tools are gone? Not to mention the tremendous sentimental value of Richy's white guitar.

We are crushed but not destroyed. God will have to work- there is no way in the natural that we can rebuild that amount of equipment quickly- it took 10 years to buy it the first time.

Someone paid for us to go to Galveston for two days, and we are decompressing and resting and trying to make a plan. It's just instruments, maybe you're thinking. That's true... but it's hard not to fall apart right now and question how in the world we are going to do what we know we're supposed to do.

Maybe tomorrow I can get my head around the last month and give you an update- it was astounding... it was encouraging.