“Great preparation moves things from your head to your hands and then into your heart.”

I recently wrote about how our presence on stage invites people to worship or invites people to watch and it depends on how we are engaging in the moment ourselves.  But sometimes as worship leaders and musicians we struggle to engage and while it can be a spiritual connection we lack it could also be as simple as preparing musically to a depth where we can actually be emotionally and spiritually present in the moment.

Here is what I mean…

Preparation always starts in our heads.  When we are preparing to play music we have to learn the songs. We have to pour over chords and lyrics and try to emulate what we are hearing.  We have to mentally comprehend the rise and fall of the song.  We have to learn the arrangement and know when we come in and when we go out.  We have to learn parts and specifics.  It’s a very mental thing.

Then we take all of that mental learning and we move preparation from our head to our hands. We execute the song over and over again.  We physically learn how to play the song.  We discover how to move from one chord to another, from verse to chorus, from start to finish.  We discover we can play everything and that’s usually where preparation stops, in our hands.

But there is place that we have to take our preparation if we truly want to engage in the moment of worship. We have to take preparation to our hearts.  We have to commit the song, the parts, the chords, the lyrics to our hearts.  The mental understanding of the song (head), the physical execution of the song (hands), must be so committed that we can actually engage our hearts emotionally and spiritually in the moment.  If we are staring at our hands or at the confidence monitors trying to remember things or execute parts it’s fairly certain that our preparation never got all the way to our hearts.

I heard Wilco guitarist Nels Cline say once that he wants to be so familiar with a song that he’s not thinking about his body, but just levitating.  His desire was to be so mentally and physically automatic that he could be emotionally and spiritually engaged in the moment at hand.

Great preparation moves from your head to your hands and then into your heart. Head. Hands. Heart. Are you ready?

Key Thoughts:

• Great preparation begins through learning
• Great preparation ends in your heart

What are some great practices when it comes to preparing songs?