During my first year of college (1982-1983) I could plug in my electric guitar, shut off the lights, drop the needle to the vinyl at the beginning of numerous albums by Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Scorpions, Judas Priest, Motorhead, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Rush (just to name a few), and play along until the side ended.  Not that I played them perfectly of course….  Very close… yes. But being perplexingly impatient, I learned everything by ear and if I couldn’t figure a part out within the first several tries I would “make something up” that I thought sounded close…  My buddies in our high school garage band would look at me funny when I tried to show them how to play a song like Space Truckin’…  They’d say, “Really?  That’s not how it goes.  Are you sure?”  But I would insist that it was correct and move on to showing them the next part of the song.  (We played so loud, you couldn’t really tell the difference anyway…)

Fast forward to 2001, just a few weeks after I got baptized in the swimming pool behind the church with my wife, Laura, our youngest daughter, Jennifer, and a few others.  In the blink of an eye, before I realized what I was doing, I found myself saying to the church worship leader on a Wednesday evening, “Maybe I should be on the worship team…”  To which she enthusiastically responded, “Yes.”  The only problem was that I had barely touched my acoustic guitar in the preceding  several years (and I didn’t even own an electric guitar anymore).  To make it even more ridiculous, September 11th happened a few weeks later, and my first time on the platform with the worship team was that following Sunday.  The worship leader had chosen an old hymn by Fannie Crosby called “Rescue the Pershing (Care For the Dying)” which is loaded with seventh chords!  Seventh chords?!?!?  I’d heard of them, but I had certainly never encountered them playing (my versions of) Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden!  So not only was I speed-relearning how to play guitar so that I could get up and play in front of a crowd of people all of a sudden, but I now had only a couple days to learn how to swiftly and accurately get my fingers in position for a bunch of new chords I’d never played before.  I wasn’t in the garage band anymore, and nobody was going to appreciate me trying to fake my way through seventh chords throughout a worship song on a Sunday morning!

From that Sunday on through the next ten years or so, I lead worship at Church Services, Chapel Services, Bible Studies, Children’s Church, VBS, Men’s Groups, and Coffeehouses well more than a thousand times.  (Not kidding.)  I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site about how we served at the Syracuse Rescue Mission Chapel for several years.  (Now I’m getting to the point finally…)  One evening, during the time I was serving there full time on staff as a Chaplain, one of the men there asked me if I could make him a CD of some of the songs we sang at Chapel and before the Men’s Group, since he loved them so much.  (Yes, homeless people do have phones and CD players and DVD players… I used to get asked about that all the time…)  So, I borrowed Jim Livi’s Mac, and recorded several CDs worth of worship songs to share with the man who asked for them and then with others who wanted copies once they heard they were available.

So now I’ve put together several of those recordings as one album for this website.  It’s called “NOT MY OWN” since I didn’t write any of these songs and have no rights to them.  I’m honestly not even sure who wrote several of them (nor have I ever bothered to look it up…).  The phrase “Not My Own” is a reference to 1 Corinthians 6:19-20:  Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?  You are not your own, for you were bought with a price (which is Christ on the cross).

My hope and prayer is that either: (1) you’ve never heard some of these songs before, and you really should hear them!  If you like them, then you can seek out the original versions sometime, or (2) you haven’t heard these songs in quite a long time, and they take you back to that place of worship where you encounter your first love again (Revelation 2:4-5).

Either way, I do pray that you draw near to Jesus as you listen.  Worship God (Revelation 22:9)!