Uh-Oh
I messed up in a big way this week. We’ve been producing Chapel Online videos for the past few months and Mrs. Christine brings in the occasional guest to help teach the kids about the Bible. We were filming Wednesday afternoon, but I was the guest this time. That meant I just hit record on the camera, we did the lesson, and turned it off. It wasn’t until today when I started to edit the video that I realized that for most of the shoot I wasn’t completely in front of the green screen. Now a better editor could probably fix my mistake in no time, but this is at the edge of my computer’s and my abilities. After profusely apologizing to Christine, we’ve scheduled a reshoot and we’ll get something put together for the kids, but I still feel awful. You can guarantee that I’ll be double and triple checking the marks and frames to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.
As much as I hate sharing this mistake with you, it serves as a reminder to myself that the culture we’ve been trying to cultivate in our production team is working. At every single tech team training I start off with the same thing. We help enable the church to fulfill its vision of being Christ’s light, life and love and that means that everything we do is spiritually significant. Because everything we do is spiritually significant, that means we are going to have grace for mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable, but we’d be failing as Christ followers if we didn’t forgive the mistakes of others. However, because everything we do is spiritually significant, we are not going to be comfortable with mistakes. Feeling like your stomach is going to drop out of your body is an appropriate reaction. Even if the mistakes are minor, if they distract from the message then we’ve unintentionally put up a barrier between people hearing what they need to. So because we are uncomfortable with mistakes, we will always strive to be better. Even if it’s not from a mistake, we can always improve on something. As one of my former pastors used to say, no service has walked on water.
This week’s mess up went through all of these steps. Christine showed incredibly grace for my mistake, I’ve very uncomfortable with the mistake I made, and we’re working on ways to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. Even though we’ve adopted these three things as a part of our tech teams core identity, they apply to every other aspect of church life and even our personal lives. As proclaiming Christ followers, everything we do has spiritual significance, especially when it comes to our interactions with other people. Mistakes are going to be made, either by you, your family, your coworkers, or your neighbors. How you respond to those mistakes is everything. Always start with grace, you don’t have to be comfortable with the mistake but you do have to be gracious about it, and strive to be better or to help others be better.