Oh, the little things...

Sometimes it's the little things in life that get you. Take, for instance, one teeny, tiny, little beat:

This weekend for worship at Victory we were doing "The Stand" by Hillsong Young & Free. They have a great new remix version of the original song (buy it on iTunes here) and we were all really excited to introduce this new arrangement of a well-known song to our congregation.

As we got into rehearsal, we discovered that we wanted to repeat the Chorus a few times and then tag the ending line "All I have is yours..." a few times to make the ending smooth. No problem--this only required a simple audio edit on my part to chop up the track and slightly rearrange it in order to serve our needs. After editing the track, we started rehearsing and everything went fine until we reached the end. For some reason, every time we played through the end of the song our whole band kept falling apart, our drummer seemed to be having trouble finding "one," (the down-beat, which establishes the song's tempo) and the singers were all thrown off and looking around like "What's going on? Where are we???"

It was UTTER CHAOS.

Being the perfect, responsible  (ahem) Music Director that I am, I approached the drummer and asked "What's going on? You keep falling apart and losing the beat at the end of the song. I need you to stick to the tempo and just play the simple beat."

He responded by saying, "I think there might be an extra beat in the track or something?"

Sure enough, upon examination of the track I had edited, the overhanging beat stuck out like a sore thumb, exposing my hasty arrangement work:

One click of the mouse fixed everything. After shortening the track by one simple little beat, the world was made right again. The band played like champs. The drummer found One. And the singers knew where they were. Oh yes--it was quite the happy ever after.

The moral of this story is this: small, quick decisions can sometimes yield some pretty big ugly results; however, the good news is that once you realize where you have missed it (if you're big enough to admit it), one small, quick change can put you and your teams back on track and steaming full-speed ahead towards success.

Are there big problems in your life, profession, or relationships that might be easily fixed by a small, quick change? Never underestimate the exponential power of making right decisions, no matter how small and insignificant they might seem.

By the way, here's what our happily ever after looked like: