This past Sunday evening was the Community Thanksgiving service. Our church hosted it, so even though another pastor brought a computer and projection system to use to show song words on a screen and play two songs that came with a CD to sing along, I was needed to play the piano and Michael was needed to lead the singing for the songs that had no CD accompaniment.

The devil does not like computerized systems at our church. Never has one smoothly turned on and run as described in any promotional materials. Great is thy faithfulness except in electronics. It is well with my soul, but not with my projector. How great thou aren’t, oh cursed Panasonic gadget. I’ve got a river of sheer rage and annoyance flowing out of me every time the power switch is turned on.

Something like that.

Michael arrived after the service started, and took a look at the song sheet as the final roar of the opening hymn faded. Prior to the start of the service, one song had to be changed because I didn’t have the music for one of the projected songs that the other pastor had selected. So, while a pastor was up front leading in a responsive reading (so the Lutherans would feel at home in the Assembly of God church), Michael was leaning across from the front pew indicating he didn’t know the replacement song.

“Yes, you know it,” I mouthed back.

“No.”

At the risk of being mouthy, I mouthed “No, you know it.”

There was little time to continue this witty exchange.

The reading was still going on, so I reached into my pile of piano books to find another book with the same song so he could get an idea of the melody line. Then the first projected song with CD music started, and everyone stood up to sing. I slid away from the piano, and tried to sing the melody line to the song, quietly (and horrendously off-key, as is my gift).

Michael had a faintly nauseated look on his face.

As he bounded up to the front of the church, the computerized song-with-music now over and all of the elderly people re-adjusting their hear aids down a notch or two, the computerized projection system flipped an error message up on the screen, covering the all but the edges of the lyrics of the first song Michael was supposed to lead. It was an error message that refused to go away, as it turns out.

“Check air flow.”

I could have used some air right about then, so I could understand the projector’s discomfort. Community services terrify me since the church is very full and full of people I don’t know.

It’s funny how you think you know a song because you’ve sung it a million times but once faced without the words in front of you, you are at last aware of the gaps in the electrical firings of your brain. It becomes a moment where everyone sings the first or second line with gusto and then all of a sudden you hear a significant drop in congregational volume while everyone mumbles and coughs and pretends to be interested in their hands or their neighbor’s head. Michael got to do this same thing but in front of everyone, holding a microphone.

Should I just stop playing or keep going? I wondered. I kept playing. It was a lonely moment to be the pianist. I tried to slide a little lower at the piano and wondered if it would be possible to somehow melt into the wood grain of the piano.

We struggled through “We Will Glorify” and then “Shout to the Lord”, very little glorification and shouting going on since the error message never left the screen.

“Check air flow.”

I wondered how that last song at the very end of the service was going to go, since Michael didn’t know it and now, with the added bonus of no lyrics, would have to lead in ignorance.

I kept playing while the lyrics remained safely hidden behind the error message.

At some point during the main singing, Michael decided that he’d had enough of that, and told the congregation to take out their hymnals and turn to page three. I always cringe when we do a hymn on a whim, since I find them more difficult to play because they are so packed with notes and I never know what people will pick, but page three was one I knew: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.

I would take any blessing and, at that point in the service, taking every blessing sounded very fine, indeed. The congregation sang loudly and I didn’t even mind playing in three flats, which I find an awkward key for some reason.

The new Methodist pastor got up to speak; she had a fine message. I was, however, distracted because everything went a little wonky and I knew there was one more song to come. The message was soon over and I heard Pastor Tony turn to Michael, sitting in the front pew ahead of me, and tell him that we wouldn’t be doing the last song because the other visiting pastor must have indicated somehow that the system just would not work.

“We’re not doing it?” I heard Michael ask.

“Check air flow.”

Oh, for air, when your chest is constricting and making it hard to breathe.

I slid up to the piano like a character from a Dali painting, and started flipping through the hymnal. Air flow indeed — it was dead air. The congregation sat in silence and waited. Michael walked up to the front with a hymnal, made a joke about air flow, and announced we’d be singing a hymn instead of the planned song. “Turn to page 268.”

Randomly selected, unplanned hymns make me a prayer warrior.

Please, God, don’t let it have a bunch of flats. Please. Please let it be one I know. Please. Oh, please. Have mercy on me, a human being with shaky hands and hatred for flats. I then started to program my mind to think of five flats as two sharps because, for some reason, the Assembly of God hymnal has seen fit to populate the book with an excessive number of five-flat hymns. The key of D flat is not my favorite. The key of D, however, is, and that’s why I tried to start programming myself to see any possible terror of a key signature as sharps instead of flats as I flipped the pages towards 268.

After staggering through the hymn and the closing of the service, I heard Mike telling the new Methodist pastor that we were used to “flying by the seat of our pants here, but not that low.”

We’re used to God’s leading the service, but not Panasonic.

I dread any projector systems used in our church. This always happens. Our church is still using the overhead projector technology and the worst it does is have a burned-out bulb.

“We could’ve,” I heard a fellow say, “just sung the words we could see on the edge that weren’t covered by the error message, and hummed the middle section.”

I imagined that, the community service sounding like a kazoo section.

Were that to happen, the moment when the rocks would cry out would immediately commence.

Truly.