This is my fifth year at Emmanuel Bible college, hopefully my last year but one that I have learned a lot especially in regard as to how I worship and praise God. A lot of this has to do with musical worship but I think the lessons can be applied to other forms of worship. I write this as much for myself as I write to hopefully let other people see my mistakes and hopefully learn from them.

To start with my background, I came from a fairly conservative Church; no huge amount of expression, maybe the occasional hand raise and clapping. I didn’t though because my brothers and family teased me relentlessly about my lack of ability to clap on time, so I’d stop.

When I came to EBC my first year was intense, I was introduced quickly to a lot of different forms of worship, musical or otherwise that I had not really been introduced to, and it ignited a hunger inside of me. I wanted more of it and this would peak in my first semester at a worship event put on by one known as DJ Cubix. It was an intense and stretching experience. There was no traditional music, but I worship and danced, and praised God in ways that I never had before. This was intense, this was a high for me something that I wanted to achieve again.

While my first year was intense, it was not to last. In second year I tried to replicate the high I had in my first year, but it would not happen. Throughout my second year I repeated what I did in first, attended all the chapel services I could, attended all the Pj’s and Praise events, and yet something felt wrong, I wanted more of what I felt first year and yet by my own effort I could not achieve it, and things would go from bad to worse. Worship and spiritual experience became dry, the more I tried to experience the drier it felt. By my third year, it was simply starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth; still going and seeking that high, that spiritual drug. I still attended events out of ritual, yet the music sounded sickeningly repetitive. I spend time at church counting the number of songs waiting for the music to hurry up and get over. Hearing songs, the same songs over and over, I simply became sick of it, and so I pulled back.

Through the second half of my third and beginning of my forth year I backed off. I attended chapel because of my involvement in making sure the computers ran properly, but stopped going to Pj’s and Praise unless I felt I was meant to be there, and when I did go, I didn’t try to dance or force some experience on myself.

As I stepped back from this forced effort, I was able to see and watch. It dawned on me that I had been treating my spiritual experience like a drug. I was trying to “take” more of it, to satisfy a craving for it. It was a high that I wanted to achieve and then replicate, but that was not how it works. Our experience with God, the joy we get from it, comes not by our own effort, but by the will and decision of God. As I stopped trying to force something out of my worship experiences, and simply just worship, it start to feel fresh again to me. Even the some of the songs that I had started to hate became new and fresh as I simply was just able praise God. As I publically prayed, it no longer felt like I was doing so just to hear my own voice. I once again was able to feel free in worship, and not like something that I was just doing out of habit.

I hope that for everyone here at EBC, that our times of worship are freeing and not something we feel like we have to do. Don’t just go to chapel because it is there everyday, or Pj’s and Praise because it’s what everyone else is doing, but attend because you want to meet God, and let yourself meet him. God is already out on the dance floor simply waiting for us to stop trying to dance by ourselves and join him.

-Wesley Hague