photo: dinner at Ramsi's.  Joe is the tall, smiley one in dark blue.

Most people are shorter than me.  But Joe Johnson is not.  He's 6'5''.  He teaches at University of Missouri at Columbia.  Among other awards, he was a runner up for the Aperture Foundation Prize in 2008.  He was an apprenticing assistant for Abelardo Morrell for 3 years (one of my favorite art photographers).  He grew up in Kansas and went to school in San Francisco and New York.  He's been published in a bunch of places and has had fancy exhibits.  In short, he has the whole list of accomplishments I myself dreamed of having while I was studying photography at UofL.

I could have mentioned any of that this past Friday night when I introduced him before his artist talk, but I didn't.  Instead, without thinking really at all, I just stepped up to the mic and blurted out what was essentially a disclaimer about his words being only his own, and not necessarily reflecting the views of the venue or the church.  I had the thought to give that sort of disclaimer earlier in the week only because he was going to be talking about megachurches and if his opinions about megachurches came out I didn't want people to think that those were shared opinions with Sojourn.  Fair enough, but it's not cool to just give a disclaimer and not share a single fact about how awesome Joe's work is, or how swell of a guy he is, or anything.  Anything.

It wouldn't have been extra terrible except that somewhere in the process of giving this stupid introduction, I must have stepped on the power cord for the projector so that the projector needed to be plugged in and restarted, making an awkward introduction more awkward.  In the end though, Joe got up there and gave the best artist talk I think the 930 has ever had.

As soon as my little fiasco occurred, I was embarassed, but that night and the next morning my bafoonery was ringing in my head.  I'm such a moron.  I'm such a moron.  Why do I get to be the director of this awesome arts ministry if I can't even introduce an artist without disgracing him and unplugging his powerpoint?  These are the thoughts I was having.

Now, it's Tuesday and I'm not waking up with those thoughts ringing in my head.  The thought process that stopped the 'voices' went something like this:

Why do I cringe so bad at my own faultiness?  Do I really think I've ever deserved my position at the 930 and Sojourn?  No, of course not.  If I got everything right all the time, where would God's grace be found?  It's grace that anybody would let me get in front of a microphone.  It's grace that I've got the 'job' that I've got.  It's grace that I get to meet artists that are like heros to me.  It's grace that Joe didn't hold such a bad introduction against me.  It's grace that secures a future for me, not my own accomplishments. God's grace is sufficient and maybe it will grow me to not screw up in the same way next time.