I was helping a kid play keyboard on the worship team. He had taken piano lessons for a while, but never tried this kind of piano playing in worship, so this was his first time playing with the worship team. He was struggling to follow the worship leader, and at one point, he was apologizing for his “bad playing.”
This brought me back to when I first starting playing keyboard for worship. I was pretty young with some piano lessons under my belt, just like that kid, and didn’t know that much about the technical aspects of worship.
It took me a while to figure how what to do with my hands, as we play in chords instead of sheet music. I finally grasped the importance of choosing or communicating keys for worship songs YEARS after I started. I didn’t know how to choose keys or how to find my vocal range for the keys either. If all this sounds like gibberish to you, you have an accurate representation of my early years (and some times current years) in worship. I had a pretty stretched out learning curve in worship and still am learning more things that I didn’t know before.
I ended up telling the kid on the keyboard “It’s ok. We all have to start somewhere. A lot of what we we do on keys comes from playing around with it, making mistakes, and figuring out what works for us. Just start whenever/wherever you are comfortable, and then go from there.” I ended up playing the keyboard with him so he had an idea of where we were in the songs and what to play. He had a few rough spots and took a few breaks during worship, but by the end of it, he was able to follow the leader, understand the chord timing, and was overall more confident in himself at the end. For his first time, that’s pretty good.
You may be considering trying out something new. Maybe the Lord has put something on your heart to start doing, but it’s a daunting task and you’re not sure if you can do it. I get it. It’s tough doing something new. However, every mistake or “wait, what am I supposed to do??” is an opportunity for us to learn and grow in what we’re doing.
If you’re starting something for the first time, keep at it! The first step is the hardest, and it (usually) gets easier from there. The learning curve starts at zero. You can only go up from there.