Are you addicted to anything. I’m trying to think of the one thing I’m the most addicted to. What do I really crave when I don’t get it? It’s got to be food for me. I guess more accurately, eating too much food. I’ve never tried drugs or cigarettes, so I don’t really know what it feels like to be addicted to those. Hopefully I can kick the food addiction at some point, sooner than later.

Other than food, I think the next thing I’m currently most addicted to is praise & worship. Strange, I know. It hasn’t always been that way. I don’t think I really experienced real worship until I was in my late 20’s or early 30’s. I mean, I grew up in church, but never really knew what it felt like to really passionately worship God. I think I first learned to experience real worship when I joined a small group of guys about 8 years ago. One of the guys in the group was a talented musician and could play any song on request on his guitar. Often when we would meet, we would sing praise songs to kick off our get together. And sometimes, that’s all we would do… until it was time to play foosball :-) That was when I got a taste of worship. It was then that I began collecting lots of worship music. That was in the Napster heyday. I know, ironic.

Then I attended my first National Youth Worker Convention. And they had a couple groups there leading worship for a crowd of about 6,000 youth workers packed into the basement of a convention center in Nashville. That’s when I knew I was hooked. Those 2 worship leaders were the little known Chris Tomlin and David Crowder. Praising God alone is one thing, but praising God with a group of 6,000 other passionate worshipers is something on a whole new level. That convention only came around once a year, and I knew I could not live on that. I would put that date on my schedule about 6 months in advance, and just count down the days until it came. In the mean time, I would get my worship fix with the youth on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. It seemed like it was just enough to get by at times, and other times it seemed like I was having withdrawls.

Then when my 5 year old entered the children’s program, my wife and I stepped down from the youth and began helping with his age group. I hadn’t really anticipated it at the time, but we weren’t just stepping down from the youth, but we were also stepping out of the regular times of worship. So we were left with worshiping with the adults on Sunday morning. And with the lack of praise & adoration among the adults in our church, I quickly felt very starved, and knew something had to give.

Long story short… (I know, too late), we left the church we had been in for about 10 years, and moved to another local church that has a group of people that also enjoy passionately worshiping God. It feels good. I can honestly say those few minutes on Sunday morning are among the highlights of my week.

I haven’t been to a national youth workers convention in almost 2 years now, after going to about 6 in a row, and I really miss it. The convention cost $375 to attend, and it was always well worth it to me. Now I’m thinking, even though I don’t work with youth at the moment, I would pay $375 for 3 days of that passionate corporate worship in a heartbeat. Spoken like a true junkie.