Rewriting Psalm 150

I think I had the most amazing experience this week of my career as a church musician.

My Pastor has been on the look out for a Hammond B3 for oh, about - FOREVER.  We've made do with a couple of donated organs, which were very helpful to begin training other keyboardists.

But they were not Hammonds by any stretch of the imagination.

Tuesday morning I was working at the church, and Pastor called me - "Hey, I found an organ on Craigslist. Why don't you give this guy a call and see if he's legitimate - he's got a Hammond B3 for sale, two Leslies, asking just over $2000 for the whole set up."

I practically hung up on the Pastor to check this out.  Turns out the owner is a former Apostolic church organist from central Ohio, and he had this beautiful beast in his own home.  After many years he was now ready to part with it if it would be used in an Apostolic church.

We dropped everything, distributed the children to their respective caretakers, and drove to Ohio to pick up this organ.

I also managed to pick up a sty in my eye while we were up there, but hey, it's a small price to pay for this investment.

It plays beautifully, looks fantastic, and stinks to high heaven like bassett hounds.  Dear Lord.  I am not kidding.

So now I have the great privilege of re-learning how to play the organ, after about 12 years of only playing a keyboard.  I'm also throwing two young ladies into the pool by alternating their Sunday nights to play the organ when they are not praise singing.

I'm trying to pull together an instruction manual for them to get started, and decided to use The YouTube (haha - Chris's grandma talks about The YouTube just like that and we can't help but to gently mock and honor her by saying the same thing :) ) as a reference tool.

My. MERCY. There are some fine musicians out there with fantastic tutorials.  I can't wait to really dive in and educate myself on this instrument.  I need a laptop so I can just set it up there on the Leslie and have The YouTube teach me right there in front of the organ.  One of my favorites is called Praise Him On The Hammond.  Well, actually it's misspelled so it's Prasie Him, but it made me think of just adding an extra special word to Psalm 150.  Not just praising Him on the organs IN GENERAL, but I do believe Jesus is going to let me take this Hammond B3 to Heaven when that final trumpet sounds.