I'll never fully understand whoever decided the liturgical calendar. Christmas at least has the decency to show up on the same day every year. Easter is another matter entirely. It drifts around the calendar like that one friend who refuses to settle down, just bouncing from couch to couch, showing up whenever it feels like it. For those of us in production, there's no real off-season between them. We go from celebrating the birth of Christ to the full weight of the redemptive story, death, burial, resurrection, in what feels like a sprint with no recovery time.
The room was nearly ready—but I wasn’t.
So there I was, Thursday of Easter week. Work had been building for weeks, planning, prepping, sourcing gear, designing the layout, all of it. We're currently in the middle of construction on a new auditorium, and we were expecting attendance to exceed what our main room and existing overflow space could handle. The solution was an additional overflow area in our student center: 300 chairs, a giant screen, double-stacked projectors on a truss tower, and a PA system. Our production partner, the company we rent additional gear from when we need it, had just arrived on site, and we were deep in the setup when my phone lit up. Staff prayer in the main auditorium. Then a text from my boss asking where I was.
I replied that someone needed to stay with the production company and that I'd get there as soon as I could. I didn't say it as nicely as I should have.
I made sure the crew was set and walked over. I want to be clear about my emotional state at this point. I was annoyed. My boss smiled when I came through the door. I made sure my face communicated that I had seen the smile and was not moved by it. I took my place in the circle on stage and stood there with my arms folded like a kid who'd just been told to come inside.
I thought everything depended on me—until it didn’t.
Our senior pastor was leading the staff through everything happening that weekend, the ways God was already moving, the anticipation of what was coming. My coworkers had caught the vision. You could feel it in the room. Me, I was running logistics in my head, still mentally in the student center, trying to figure out what this was costing me in productivity and what the crew was doing without me there. I felt guilty for not being more present spiritually in that moment, and equally frustrated that my absence was probably holding up the guys on the other side of the building. Two kinds of failing at once, which is a special kind of miserable for me.
I kept praying for a change of heart, knowing I should feel differently than I did and not being able to manufacture it on my own.
I grew up in the church, a pastor's kid. I've been in full-time production ministry for nearly twenty years. My faith has deep roots, and I know the difference between a hard moment and a systemic one. But standing there in that circle, I couldn't figure out why I was so resistant. And then it came to me, quietly, mid-prayer.
I was Martha.
In Luke 10, Martha is doing everything right by every measurable human standard. The house needs to be ready, the work needs to be done, and she's the one doing it. Martha wasn't wrong about the work. There is work that needs to be done. But she's also keeping score, and she's annoyed that her sister isn't helping, and when she brings it to Jesus, he doesn't validate the frustration. He says Mary has chosen the better thing. Martha lost track of what the work was for.
I was so locked into the work of the weekend that I had stopped paying attention to the people and to God, and to what the room was actually for. Standing in that circle while my mind was back at the truss tower, I was doing the same thing Martha did. Prioritizing the preparation over the presence.
Something shifted after that. Not dramatically. There was no moment where the ceiling opened up. It was more like the tension in my shoulders went out, and I remembered where I was and why. By the end of the prayer time, I was back in it, even laughing a little at myself. I know this pattern. I've done this before. It reminded me of Peter, who had a gift for leading with action and catching up with his own intentions later.
Before I walked back out, I found my boss and said what needed to be said, acknowledging my overreaction. That I was being Martha, so consumed with making sure the room was ready that I'd walked away from the moment right in front of me. That while my intentions could be viewed as noble, my reaction and attitude hadn't been. There's something worth naming about being in a place where that kind of conversation is possible. Where you can say I messed that up, please forgive me, and have it actually received. Not every workplace is that, and I don't take it for granted.
Then I walked back to the student center to survey the damage, fully expecting to find everything stalled, the crew standing around waiting on their fearless leader to return and tell them what to do. Instead, I walked in to find the projectors already secured to the truss, alignment already underway, the whole thing moving forward without me. I stood back, watching the team in place handle it, just soaking it in.
The setup was fine. My focus wasn’t.
I had already done the work that was mine to do. The planning, the sourcing, the organizing, the vision for what the space needed to be. That was my role, and I'd done it before I ever left that room. While I was gone, having my Martha moment tantrum in the prayer circle, they'd done theirs.
Easter weekend, that overflow space filled up. Leadership loved it, and there was even talk about keeping something like it going more permanently. People sat in those 300 chairs and heard the Easter message in a room that worked because of decisions made weeks before.
The Easter story has always been about God finishing what we couldn't finish on our own. And I don't want to overspiritualize a pair of projectors and some folding chairs, but that's exactly what played out in the student center while I was standing in the prayer circle with my arms crossed. The room got built. The projectors got aligned. The work got done. The only thing that almost didn't happen was me being present with God in the hour He was asking for me, the hour where I could have been seeking Him for the things only He can do that weekend, instead of white-gloving a setup that was already in good hands. I was so busy trying to make the room perfect that I nearly missed the one thing I couldn't produce on my own.
If you've been in this long enough, you've probably had your own version of that prayer circle moment. The work pulled you away from the why, and you didn't even notice until something stopped you. Maybe it's the week you realized you couldn't remember the last time you sat in a service and actually received something instead of running it.
When's the last time something stopped you long enough to remember why you started in the first place?
