music makes me smile!

In the last couple of weeks I have been blessed to attend two great events. The first one was the Jeremy Riddle concert. I have really loved Jeremy Riddle ever since I first heard "Sweetly Broken" sang by the worship team a couple years ago. That song was so moving that I wanted to hear it more, I got hooked on Jeremy Riddle that way. If you have never heard him then you should definitely listen to that song! Steadfast, the local band that opened for him was great too. They are from the Life Church, which was where to show was. They had a lot of energy and their music was great! Then Jeremy Riddle came out and shared with us that he was sick, which strangely didn't seen to effect his singing very much, he was still awesome! One thing that I really liked about the church stage was the lights; they had these white blocks on the wall with lights behind them and when they would flash it made the whole thing look like it was rippling. It was pretty cool! While we were waiting for Jeremy Riddle to come on the girl in front of me, who goes to Life Church was telling me that their worship team is really great, so I told her that we have a pretty good one too. It was kind of funny that we were having that conversation because Scott, the worship leader from my church was who we were sitting with.
So then today we went to Pucks n Praise to watch a makeup Grizzly hockey game. They have done these 2 years in a row now. For the make up game, they invite churches from the valley to sell the tickets to church members and half the cost goes directly to the Salt Lake Rescue Mission. The game was really terrible for the first two periods. Not one goal was made, seriously. I was pretty bored. Then they woke up in the third period and made 3 goals. The first one they kind of worked for and it went in with so much ruckus that no one noticed that it went in, Steve said I was the first one to notice and my yell was what alerted everyone else that they made the goal. The second one was an awesome play, the player had the goalie out of his goal with his back to the goal and he passed it off to a teammate who sucker punched the goalie so smoothly that we were laughing. The third one was ridiculous, the goalie was away and no one was even close to the goal, it was made a griz team member from about 20 feet away! Too easy, but that goalie looked pretty mad, he was in the team shelter. Well that got us all pumped and ready to worship. When the game was over we all headed to one section of the arena to get ready for Steele Croswhite. I had never heard of him, but on Wed his brother spoke at the church as a guest. This year was a little different than last year in a better way. They turned off the lights and it was more like a concert. Last year they had all the house lights on and it felt kind of weird to look around a huge empty arena. Steele and his band were awesome. He introduced us to his 9 month pregnant wife who was singing by his side. She was so adorable and so pregnant. He talked about how she makes him want to be a better man and that he doesn't even want to sing unless she is with him. It was very sweet, but most of all Steele gave all the glory to God and praised the lord with a great enthusiasm and love for the Lord. He was shining God's light in an awesome way. I just kept thinking "I'm so glad I came, I can't imagine missing out on this"! Steve thought it was great when he asked everyone if they felt the way this specific Psalm was describing, and then he said if you don't then you'll have a really "sucktastic" walk with Jesus. Steve laughed so hard about that one! This guy had an awesome stage presence and was so on fire for the Lord that when it was over I wasn't done, I wanted to hear more. I think we'll be visiting the Rock Church sometime. Steele's bands along with a few others rotate to do worship on Saturday nights. I have heard great things about The Rock but we have never gone, I truthfully was thinking something along the lines of snake worshipers or something crazy like that. Wow, how my imagination can take over sometimes.