Josh Young

What just happened?

That is exactly what I was asking myself yesterday after our service.

I’ve been filling in on bass for a while since we seem to be missing a bassist at the moment (not my strongest instrument, but I can keep up). Since I don’t have a bass, I’ve been using our drummer’s bass (he’s actually a bass player also, but he’s filling in on drums since we seem to be missing a drummer at the moment — notice a theme?). Our drummer didn’t make it to practice yesterday morning due to stomach issues, and since his bass didn’t make it there either, I had nothing to practice with.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that one huge weakness I have musically is the drums. I just haven’t had a chance to play them much over the past years. Quite frankly, I think I stink at them. I joke about it frequently. So I was a bit taken when Brian, our worship minister, asked me to play the drums during practice. I think he was half joking, but I sat down and told everyone to prepare for the worst.

Halfway through practice, I realized that I hadn’t screwed anyone else up yet, and I was sort of proud of myself just for that simple fact. So we finished practice, and waited for the service to start.

A few minutes before the service, Brian told me to go ahead and play for the service. Now I knew he had to be joking. There is no way that Josh Young is going to make his drumming debut on a Sunday morning. Who knows what could happen. I don’t want to be responsible for ruining worship for everyone. But he assured me that it sounded fine, and since I know he won’t feed me a line of crap, I went ahead and did it.

It’s a good thing I don’t get nervous anymore — because this would have been the time to be nervous. But I sat up there and played for the whole service — no fills, mostly the same beat on every song, but I was pretty steady. I have no idea how it happened, but it did. AND IT WAS ALL GOD. There is no way that I had anything to do with that.

Our drummer was able to make it in about halfway through the worship set, and he said that he was actually really surprised. He thanked me for filling in for him on the drums, and said that with what I’ve told him about how bad I am with drums, he expected me to be horrible (big confidence booster). But he said that I actually did really good and was steady, which meant a lot to me.

So anyway, bottom line, I just want to say thank you so much to my Lord for getting me through that because I had no idea what just happened. God must be a great drummer to have made me sound like I wasn’t totally horrible.

Amen.