worship

a few things I'm learning about leading worship:

Songs don't have to contain absolute truth. They can't. Trying to find songs that are absolutely true is going to be a frustrating search. That doesn't mean that songs should be sung which are obviously false, just that it's okay to be incomplete and inadequate. And, sometimes, it's more important to have accurate and meaningful ideas than facts.

I don't have to understand something to sing it. There are some songs that I don't understand, that's okay. It's okay to not understand things about God, and I don't need to be afraid of singing things that I don't understand (nevertheless, there's some songs that I might not feel comfortable singing because I don't understand them and what I don't understand seems wrong, where some songs I can sing because I don't understand but the words seem right).

What I struggle with are songs that I don't feel at the time when I'm singing them, or that aren't true at all times. In one way, this seems unimportant, that I should still be able to sing what is true even if I'm not experiencing that truth at the moment, or if I'm actually experiencing and thinking the opposite. Then again, that can just feel empty, like I'm lying. Singing what I don't believe at the time may just be lying to God and lying to everyone around me even if I know that what I am singing is true.

Another hard thing for me is that I don't want to play dumb songs, or songs that I dislike. But a song being dumb or my dislike of a song doesn't mean that it's wrong or that it's not worship or that God doesn't speak through that song to people. It's cool that God can use cheesy and stupid songs, but sometimes I wish that he didn't so that I could completely avoid them without feeling guilty about it. That doesn't happen too often, but every once in a while I feel like I should play some song that I don't like, or not play a song I really do like.