Make a CRAZY Joyful Noise!

We survived yet another Sunday in our house this week!

I know this may sound awful at first, but Sundays can seriously be rough when you have small children.  We start off early in the morning at praise team rehearsal, then Sunday School, then Worship service, grab lunch, attempt to get the kids down for a nap, I work on children's choir, and then it's back up to the church for adult choir followed by children's choir.  By the time we get home, it's usually 7:30, and we haven't even had a chance to eat dinner, thus putting bedtime to an even later time.  I'm not complaining at all--I am SO thankful we can freely worship, and I never want to take that for granted.  I'm just saying that it can be pretty exhausting.  As I was reflecting on things this past weekend though, I began to feel very convicted about my approach to Sundays.  Those of you that know me well probably know I am, by nature, a total night owl!  I love to stay up late, and honestly no matter how early I do go to bed, I still hate getting up early in the morning.  I realized something though: my staying up late on Saturday evenings can greatly impact me on Sundays.  In other words, I began to question what I was doing, if anything, to really PREPARE my heart for worship on Sunday mornings.  And if I'm not preparing my own heart for worship, I'm certainly in no position to help my children know how to prepare theirs.  So I began asking God to show me ways to help prepare my and my family's hearts for worship, and He showed me a couple things right off the bat that I needed to change...

The first thing I realized is that I CANNOT stay up too late on Saturday nights.  It's not always possible, but I'm hoping we can keep out of town activities to a minimum on Saturdays so we can make sure everyone (including Mommy and Daddy!) gets to bed at a decent hour on Saturday night.  As usual, my insomnia kicked in Saturday evening, and I found myself wide awake at 6AM with still time left to snooze before my alarm went off.  I think this was God's way of nudging me out of bed early though, because I was able to grab a cup of coffee, read my Bible, get my heart prepared for the day, feed the animals, and get the boys' clothes ironed before anyone else even woke up.  (I still couldn't manage to get out the door quite on time though.  Ugh!  Such a pet peeve of mine!)

The other thing I felt the Lord show me about preparing our hearts for worship is to really set our hearts on God first thing in the morning.  Yes, we should do this every day, but especially when we are preparing to head into a set apart time of worship, God revealed to me how important it is to prepare our hearts fully for Him.  I often will let Lucy watch a show on her ipad while I finish getting ready, and while we are pretty picky on what we let her watch, I realized that Phineas and Ferb probably wasn't doing anything to prepare her little heart to worship her Heavenly Father.  So after I fed the kids breakfast, I told them, "Let's get our hearts ready to praise Jesus this morning..." and I popped in a Hillsong Kids Jr. DVD for them.  As I walked through the room to check on them, I found them sitting together, Lucy singing and helping Gabriel "dance" to the songs as they both were smiling and laughing.  As you can see from the picture, true JOY was written all over their faces!

Were we still a little frantic in trying to leave the house at a decent time?  Yes.  Did everyone stay in a perfect mood for the entire day?  No.  But were our hearts more prepared to worship God than they usually were?  I think so.  We had already started the day off praising God, and church got to be a continuation of that time.

One of the songs on the DVD Lucy and Gabriel watched (which, by the way, if you have small children you NEED this DVD or CD--it is SO so good!) is called "Crazy Noise," which basically just talks about making a noise in such a way that everyone around you will know that you're praising God.  Life is often pretty CRAZY, and Sunday's schedule is a great example of that.  But even in the midst of the craziness, we can join in and just make an awesome exclamation out to our Heavenly Father.  That's what I saw written all over my children's faces on Sunday morning, and I hope that's what was written all over each of our hearts as we went through our jam-packed Sunday...