Sewing My Heart

By Hyorim Ahn

On the first day of the Spiritual Emphasis Week (SEW), the worship team made a mistake on starting on the song “Another in the Fire,” where everyone stumbled and stared at each other for a moment. I was stressed out, feeling trapped and squished inside a box, but bless the Lord! He gently guided me and the worship team to get backtrack to the original tempo to the song. 

For me, one of the greatest fears for leading worship was myself messing up and leading people off-track from glorifying God. However, I often struggled with staying focused and solely singing for God, which made me panic and make mistakes frequently. 

Thankfully, the mistakes I made so far had not been very obvious, until the second day for SEW came. In the morning for MS Chapel, God helped me to hold on to Him and praise Him with joy. Nevertheless, during the HS chapel, without the time to rehearsal, my anxiety made me forget to pray to God and to make my heart fully dwelling on Him, and it happened. My voice cracked. 

“I believe in YoOuUu~” As soon as I felt my voice lose its melody, I could not help it but just laugh at myself while singing. It was the worst mistake I ever made during worship, and I had to force myself to ignore everyone laughing at it. 

After the service that day, people who passed by me always mentioned it, either trying to make me feel better or teasing me. I told myself that I should have prepared myself and more with prayer. 

To be honest, the embarrassment I felt made me in part mad at myself and a little bit at God. Furthermore, my falling behind on art, struggling with college application, preparing for worship, added with my earlier mistake of a voice crack just ripped off the bag I tried to carry on and just tripped me to fall.

Despite my frustration, I knew that I could not blame God for anything, for I knew His plan was and is always great. I decided to trust and feel excited to see how He would  through my mistake grow closer to Him. 

So that night, I wrote a prayer, surrendering myself to God, asking the Holy Spirit to fill me with His power and enable me to glorify Him through the talents that He’s given me. I asked Him to heal me from my wounds of lostness and take me out from the sins of pridefulness. I asked for Him to give me a hand to stand up again so I could march on again. 

And strangely, a surge of confidence came up to my heart, and somehow I knew that God would help me through the last day of worship services and allow me to recover from the trauma of the voice crack. 

The last day’s worship service, I really experienced God working through me and the worship team, allowing us to bring a heart-filling worship. Now I even felt glad that I made a voice crack because I knew that this let me recognize again that God is the one who enables me to sing, and that He is the one who also makes me recover from my mistakes. I cannot even explain the joy that splashed on me when I truly Serving God through this SEW for me was an experience of immeasurable value.