I'm in a band!

Yep, you read that right. Who would have ever thought that I, Gracie Elizabeth, would ever be in a band, let alone, perform in front of people! Gasp! And this is how it came to be:

A couple weeks after Christmas, one of my friends bought a drumset. We all thought she was crazy to waste her money. (She can't even keep a beat while clapping. I love you, Ayla!) Once she had her drumset, her automatic reaction was to, you guessed it, start a band. She asked me to play guitar. (My guitar is blue, by the way. Don't be jealous!) So it was me and Ayla. Naturally, we had no idea how we were going to pull this off. So we asked one of our friends, a show choir kid, to help us out. She is really amazing. And I'm not just saying that because I know she's reading this. Not only does she sing, but she also plays piano, guitar, base, she learned how to play the ukilele, and she was able to write music for a violin. Did I meantion we also have a violinist? Now what else do we need? Oh right, a pianist. Duh!

There we were. The five of us struggling to play Taylor Swift together. The first song we played was "You Belong With Me" The first time we played it through and stayed on beat the whole time, we just stared at each other in awe. As in, "That's right, guys. We just did that. How cool are we?"

After playing Taylor Swift for two months, you kind of want to shoot yourself. Sorry, Taylor, I still love you! But seriously, it was time for something new. So we migrated to Christian music, and along the way someone got the wacky idea to play in youth group. Ha. As if! But the idea stuck. We had exactly two weeks, and I don't even know how many hours we practiced. It was all we talked about.

This week was it. We were going to do it. We had everything all planned out: the songs we were going to sing/play, who was to do what, we even talked about who was going to pray when we were finished. We arrived at church two hours before youth group was supposed to start and played all the songs through twice.

If you know me at all, then you know I'm not one to stand up in front of a group of people. This took guts for all of us. Something that made it easier was the thought that, since we were in youth group, our peers should be worshipping God and not looking at us. But I was still nervous that I was going to mess up, naturally.

Playing in a worship band is something I think every musician should experience, because it's not for you! It's for God. As Philippians 2:9-11 says, "Therefore, God has highly exalted Jesus and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." This is what I realized after performing. And I can't wait to do it again.