What’s The Cloud For?

Growing up in the 70’s as missionaries in Costa Rica, we shared close friendships with several missionary families. One family, Elmer and Eileen Lehman, had five adopted children who became close friends with my sisters and me. The parents were in their nineties, and ten months after the wife graduated to heaven, the husband followed.

Last week, faithful believers, a tiny bit of the fruit of their faithful decades of service, gathered to honor and celebrate his life. The organizers asked me to lead a few songs. I was glad to.

I had asked if they wanted any specific songs, but for some reason never saw their response… until the night before the service.

They did have suggestions. Well, not really suggestions. There were two songs they requested I do and had put them in the printed programs. I did not know the songs. Imagine two obscure hymns.

Now I had to learn and lead these two hymns in about 12 hours, 8 of which I was supposed to be sleeping.

I decided to wait until the morning because we had just moved and I was beat. Also, I sheepishly asked the organizer if there was someone who could sing and I could accompany. Thankfully, there was.

I spent about an hour preparing the other songs and creating charts for the two hymns and grabbed my iPad. But upon opening Music Stand several times, it kept immediately crashing. So I exchanged it for my MacBook and raced out the door. The stress!

My GPS warned me that I’d arrive about 4 minutes after the service was supposed to begin. Well, so much for playing a prelude, I thought. I went as fast as was safe, stressing all along the way. After parking, I carried my gear in not knowing quite what to expect.

Gratefully, this is Costa Rica, the land of relationships, not timeliness. There were a handful of people chatting, which turned out to be about half of those who would show up. I went up and was delighted to find out that not only was there a singer, but also another guitarist who I would simply be supporting.

I didn’t even open my laptop or look at chords, I just followed him. It was musically a piece of cake. And it was a beautiful service.

Hearing people share stories of how God had used this faithful family to disciple them, I began musing about the “great cloud of witnesses” mentioned in Hebrews 12:1.

During the meditation, the preacher read Hebrews 13:7 - “Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.

Read that second sentence slowly: “Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.”

The “cloud” has a function. We are to imitate their faith. Of course, we are to look to those mentioned in scripture, but also to those we’ve known personally.

How can I imitate their faith without a closeup look? How can others imitate mine?

Several people mentioned this leader’s influence in both formal (preaching, classes, etc.) and informal (sharing a meal, going along with them, etc.) ways.

It got me thinking of the dangers of celebrity worship leaders. We enjoy and use their music, but we don’t “live” with them. We can’t see their lives. How can we imitate their faith, if they are worthy of such imitation? We need to have leaders in our lives that we can see close enough to do this.

But we also need to BE leaders who have others seeing our lives close enough so they too can imitate our faith. We live in that tension of learning from the “cloud” and being “future inductees of the cloud.”

Why not take a moment to list out three things you most admire and are inspired by in a leader whose faith you want to imitate and three things you hope others imitate in you?

(oh, and don’t imitate my procrastination...it only leads to stress!)

-Dave Helmuth
(purchase my book, "Worship Fertilizer: (the first hundred)" HERE)

What’s The Cloud For? (Nº 434)