Once again, my eye is on the mailbox in my front yard; I’m waiting for that check containing the song royalties collected over the quarter (actually a quarter from several months ago). The till is getting low and the dollars from that check bring great relief. The past couple of years have been rough as consumers have shifted away from buying physical CDs and into the cyber-world of downloading mp3s. If people are still buying music, then where are the royalties?

My grandmother always thought that my music pursuits weren’t legitimate until one day I showed her my royalty statement and she about fell over. Needless to say, her idea of writing songs as a “real job” changed that day.

It is a privilege to make a living as a songwriter. I found these statistics online which show that if you start writing songs to make money, you probably should do something else. These numbers are culled from the music business in my backyard–Nashville:

48,000 = number of writers and artists in Nashville trying to “make it.”
1,350 = number of songs recorded in a year on major labels.
85% = percentage of songs recorded going to “insider” writers, publishers, producers, etc.
75 = number of songwriters getting 1 or more cuts per year in Nashville.

Even as I am mostly writing praise and worship songs, the percentage of writing songs to getting them recorded are very low. Why keep writing, making demos and pitching the songs, you ask? It is because I am compelled to do it. Writing songs is a joy for me. I am just very blessed to make a living doing it.

I hope the mailman comes with that check today. If he does, I have a chance to get over to the bank with enough time to get together with Gary Sadler to work on some songs that we hope will someday bless people. That is why we do it!

As we come upon the Easter season, many of us are well underway in the preparation process for the big day. In many churches, Easter is one of, if not, the biggest attended service of the year. Through this great privilege, we have the opportunity to reach our communities for God. These “calendar” opportunities come only a few times a year, so our attention to detail and quality in preparation and presentation will not only be an act of worship to God, it will also be a big reason that people come back to visit us again the following week. The subject of this installment of Creating Great Moments in Worship is about the “E” factor: excellence.

My pastor always encourages his staff to bring our “A” game to weekly worship responsibilities. I find it humorous each time he says it because I have no other game in me! I desire to give my all even though I may miss the mark in the process. I desire to be a person of excellence and I try to surround myself with others of like-mind. John Maxwell says,

“People of excellence love what they do. They have learned how to fuel the fire that keeps them moving. How do you spot a passionate person? 1) They work with their whole heart. 2) They work with un-distracted attention. 3) They work with maximum energy.”

My desire is to do my job to the best of my ability, with the best quality I can render, and with the understanding that it is ultimately a gift to the Lord. I want to submit 1o descriptions of what excellence looks like to me. Not only is it in the resulting product, but excellence is also reflected in our planning and processes.

1. Excellence requires learning
The ancient Roman poet Horace wrote this truth, “No man ever reached to excellence in any one art or profession without having passed through the slow and painful process of study and preparation.” Excellence is learned through observation and gained through applying the principles of those who have gone before us. We only know excellence after having seen it in action.

2. Excellence requires a decision
We must decide to do things well, to pay attention to detail with persistence. It is easier to take a short-cut. Doing things with excellence is most difficult when we are tired and pushed for time.

3. Excellence requires faith
When we dare to take the less traveled road of excellence, we trust that the seed we sow today, while no one is looking, will provide a robust harvest. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

4. Excellence requires courage
Doing things with excellence is, many times, a lonely activity. Excellence exposes mediocrity and some people don’t want to change. We will face criticism.

5. Excellence requires patience
Understanding and love will help others around us to pursue excellence. Our example of doing things with excellence will be the best motivator. Our love and concern for people is what attracts them to our leadership.

6. Excellence requires time
Along with patience, it will take time to do things well. John Wooden says, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” This is why we must start early in the planning process.

7. Excellence requires other people
The reality is, we cannot bring about excellence in our churches without the help of others. Volunteers are the hands and feet of the Body of Christ. We must help them find their place of service–then train, encourage and love them. We must surround ourselves with people who have skills we do not posses.

8. Excellence requires leaning from mistakes
How do we learn except by making our own mistakes and then correcting them? We can learn from another person’s mistakes, but we may be faced with unique challenges that require our own dues to be paid. Sometimes it is helpful that we fail before we succeed. Abraham Lincoln failed to be elected nine times in his bid for various public offices before he became President.

9. Excellence requires leadership
Leading others into new places requires respect, trust and love from those who follow. As church leaders, we will find ourselves with the lonely responsibility of leadership. But the rewards are great when, in pursuing excellence, we find success for ourselves and others.

10. Excellence requires communication
It is vital that we as church leaders communicate our vision, philosophy and desire to pursue excellence to our teams. Excellence is not only taught, but caught!

Each person, organization, church or denomination has it’s own idea of what excellence looks like. Regardless of style, taste, preference or culture, excellence, as coach Pat Riley said, is, “…the gradual result of always trying to do better.” King David spared no expense in the construction of Solomon’s Temple. We should pursue our ministry with all of the quality, ability and excellence we have in us. Our attention to excellence will be attractive to those who need Christ. We may not have the wealth of David at our disposal, but we can optimize the resources we’ve been given.

For me, excellence is a personal commitment. As Abraham Lincoln once said,

“I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.”

A popular Seventies song by Jim Croce starts with, “If I could save time in a bottle…” It takes a very emotionally astute person to catch special moments as they are happening. Usually we hire photographers or make an audio/video recording of the special times in our lives like weddings, birthdays and anniversaries. Many of these moments are only recorded in our memories. The ability to know a great moment when it is happening is a gift. I read of one such event that happened to Walt Disney in the summer of 1955, from the book, “The Vault of Walt.”.

Walt and his wife, Lilly, were planning to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary days before Disneyland opened to the public. Even though Walt was exhausted from all of the activity in putting final touches on the park, he still wanted to celebrate with Lilly and give a sneak-peak of his new playground to special friends and business acquaintances. Approximately 300 people were invited including Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and Louis B. Mayer. He planned a boat ride on the shiny-new Mark Twain Riverboat with Dixieland musicians playing New Orleans-style jazz. Mint juleps were flowing freely. After Walt was purported to have washed down two or three, the party moved indoors to the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, a turn-of-the-century, Old West-style theater.

Diane, Walt’s daughter who was 21-years old at the time, recalled that as the Can-Can stage show progressed, people were asking where Walt was. He had disappeared. Lilly, missing her other half, scanned the room from her seat on the floor to catch sight of Walt precariously hanging off the balcony, trying to get down to the stage. He was simultaneously pretending to fire an invisible six-shooter at the actor playing Pecos Bill, who had taken the stage. When people realized where Walt had ended up, some pointed and said, “There’s Walt!” He somehow made it safely to the stage where he just stood and beamed. This celebration was not only for 30 years of marriage, but was also the culmination of his life’s work come to pass. He was taking it all in.

As a child, Walt would fall asleep in class after spending the early mornings of each day, rain or shine, delivering newspapers. He told daughter Diane that on one cold winter morning, he slid down on a frozen front porch while delivering papers where he cried, feeling cold and alone. He never graduated from high school. He had many struggles and failed business starts, and even lost the rights to a series of films through a dubious maneuver by his distributor. He and brother Roy struggled even during Disney’s golden era of animation to secure financing for several films. So by the time Disneyland became a reality in 1955, the playground that eluded him as a kid became his to share where children and grown-ups like himself could get lost in wonder for a day. Main Street was his hometown, Adventure Land came from the books he read and the stories he grew up hearing; the park was for everyone and he wanted to share his dream.

That night at the party, many people were concerned that Walt had too much to drink. Diane remembers her dad standing there on the stage looking happy and pleased, not necessarily drunk. Just to be careful, she asked her father if she could drive him home. He surrendered his keys with, “Well, sure honey!” As he climbed into the back seat of his car, he found a map of Disneyland, or something, rolled it into a paper trumpet and blew a happy melody. Before long, Diane looked behind her and saw her father in the back seat, toy trumpet folded in his arms, fast asleep.

Oh, what a gift it is to pay close attention and take in the special times of life. They come in a heartbeat and go just as quick. Walt had the night of his life; he stood there and basked in the warmth of that special moment in time.

Hey you gadget geeks out there, a cool new service by my favorite music download site, Amazon Mp3, is now available. Not only does Amazon offer some of the best prices for downloaded music anywhere, it now hosts a way for Amazon users to upload any currently-owned music (downloaded from anywhere or ripped from your CD collection) to be accessed in a customer’s virtual “Cloud Drive.” It’s called Amazon Cloud Player for Android and Web. 5 GB of space is given initially for free. As a promotion, Amazon is offering a deal where if you by any one of 23 preselected albums for $3.99 or under, they will automatically give you 20 GB of “cloud” space, free, for a year (at which point the regular pricing takes over).

I purchased Cheryl Crow’s 100 Miles From Memphis album to download from the 23, and then a new option appeared asking if I wanted the album to automatically upload to The Cloud. Heck yes! Even though my selection sailed heavenward, I still received a link on my desktop for a download of the album to my hard drive, as usual. I went to the Android Market on my phone, downloaded the Amazon Mp3 for Android app, signed into my Amazon account there, and Cheryl Crow’s record was waiting, ready to play. Cool. I then went back to my Mac, downloaded the Amazon Mp3 Uploader. The app quickly searched my computer hard drive for music, found the all the songs available on the Mac, and created a list by song, artist and album, to choose from. I went through and selected my “desert island” songs that I supposed would fit the allotted 20 GB space. There is a very handy tool at the bottom left of the up-loader which helps keep track of the allotted GB budget. It showed that I went over my limit. That’s when my “desert island” picks had to be narrowed even further! It took about 12 hours to upload 2,777 songs (approximately 18 GB, all ripped or downloaded at mostly 256 kbps). When the songs made it to The Cloud, the player on my Android had no trouble getting to whichever of the 2,777 songs I searched.

The grade I give for the Amazon Cloud Player for Web and Android is a solid “A”–and that’s for ease of downloading all the software, setting it all up, the nominal learning curve, ease of uploading songs and playing them on the phone and from the web. We’ll see what the storage plan pricing settles into within the next year as the “Cloud Drive” concept catches on to the masses.

I think that this Cloud Drive is the wave of the future for mobile music listeners. Hard drives and local memory on mp3 players will soon be a thing of the past. The cool thing is, there are several storage capacity options–$1 per GB, per year: $50 for 50, $100 for 100, and so on. Throwing down big bucks for storage capacity on a smart phone is no longer necessary with Android phones. The Amazon uploads are to a “real” hard drive in the sky and may serve as a secondary backup for an mp3 collection. Of course, I like to have my back-ups closer to earth, on a few of my own drives (it pays to be careful!).

I can play my music library from both the web and my phone without using up a single MB, except for the small footprint of the player application! I am finding more confirmation in the wisdom of purchasing an Android phone. I am a loyal Mac user, but since the Verizon ink is still wet on the Apple contract, I will wait to see what transpires with a possible 4G iPhone in my future. The Amazon MP3 Cloud Player rocks!

Take the opportunity now to snag the 20 GB free-for-a-year offer before it, too, disappears into the clouds!

It’s hard to believe a year has passed since I began writing this blog. Brenda receives full credit for getting me into this racket! She had been writing her Smitten With Knittin’ blog for years and I’d have fun seeing her write and receive such a cathartic experience each week. Brenda is a terrific writer, and with her prompting and commitment to edit my ramblings, I pushed off from the dock into the open-internet sea as a blogger on March 31, 2010.

Since I started writing, I’ve had to find my rhythm. Posting a blog everyday was way too daunting a task even for a guy like me who, as the 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said of William Gladstone, “is inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.” I found that Monday, Wednesday and Friday are good days to post for me, sometimes more if I feel the thought is worth the effort.

In the past year, readers from four continents, and practically every state in the U.S., have been generous with their occasional visits to my blog. I have many who tell me they read regularly. If one really wants to know me–my heart, my passions–they should read my posts. I am a pretty simple guy with very common tastes, but the thing that makes my life rich is my commitment to Christ. Other than my favorite subject, Brenda and family–worship, church, guitars, gear, music, books, TV and gadgets have made consistent entries into my blog for the past 12 months.

I will continue this pursuit even if no one reads these words because, you see, it’s primarily for me. I have gained so much joy from the process that it’s self-rewarding. Thanks for joining me on this journey–I’ve got many more miles to go before I sleep.