I am Brian Woodyard. I was born in Abilene, TX and have lived here my entire life. I have attended many different types of churches in my life. I was raised Catholic until I started high school. I then began to attend a Methodist church upon a friend's invite to her youth group. I was saved in October of my freshman year and attended First United Methodist Church in Abilene up until my graduation in 2001. I then tried a few different churches trying to see what different places of worship had in common or different. I attended churches from pretty much every denomination. I went to a non-denominational church for quite a while as well. That was the first time I played on a worship team. In fact that was the first time since I started playing guitar in high school I ever played with anyone else at all. I fell away from church for a while when I got a new job that messed up my hours making it hard for me to go on an consistent basis. Then I met my beautiful wife Jessica and we soon after got married. We started to attend Beltway Park Baptist Church and became members there. We have been members there ever since. There was a time where we had stopped attending regularly for about 2 years due to my wife's work schedule and me being lazy and not wanting to get up. This was sort of a dark period for me as my relationship with God suffered deeply. In addition to that not long after the period in which we stopped attending, my guitars got stolen. That was my one outlet I used to get close to God even during that period. If I was feeling I needed to spend time with God I would get out my guitar and worship. Fast forward to January of 2012 I began to re-attend church with our friends from the stables. I attended New Hope Assembly of God with them for a few months until finally by the grace of God my wife began getting Sunday's off again and we have started back to Beltway.
I thought I might also include a bit about my playing. I started playing guitar about 12 years ago while I was in high school. My youth pastor at FUMC taught me my first 3 chords and I pretty well just taught myself from there. In many ways it has made me a very incomplete guitar player because I didn't have the experience of learning any lead stuff or even proper strum patterns or anything. I had a lot of trial and error over the years. When I started playing with others it was hard at first because I realized that when I played by myself my internal metronome didn't work and I would often speed up and slow down and be all over the place. The good thing is that when I was by myself God didn't care. I soon learned how to adapt to playing with a group and I try to practice every day now. I am currently working on developing my guitar playing more with hopes that God will use this gift and passion he placed on my heart for his Kingdom.
In about March of this year I began to realize that though my passion for worship was pure, I didn't really know as much about worship as I thought. Worship is far deeper than any song we sing or play. Its about experiencing and responding to God. Its about living your life with every action you make fixed appropriately on the throne of the Most High. I hope that this blog will help me grow and I sincerely hope it helps anyone reading it as well. I cannot wait to share my life with you and share any truths that I discover in my walk with the Great I Am.
Your Brother in Christ,
Brian
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