Imagine life as a symphony composed by God, with parts for many different players. What part do you play?
Are you a busy violin, carrying the melody with many companions? Or are you, perhaps, an English horn, with a very small but important solo part?
Or maybe you’re a percussion instrument—a triangle or tambourine, let’s say—with not only a small part but one with no melody.
Every instrument is necessary to produce the symphony, but the score for each part looks very different. Some scores are dense with notes, while others have page after page of rests.
I have a favorite Christmas tree ornament: an angel made from a piece of sheet music, fashioned such that its head contains nothing but a rest.
In music—as, I would argue, in life—the rests are as important as the notes. A symphony player who keeps coming in out of turn would be fired from the orchestra.
But so would anyone who fails to play his alotted part, however complex or onerous, or who tries to play someone else’s part. Imagine the tuba trying to sound like a violin, or the trumpet imposing its clarion call in the middle of a quiet adagio.
Every one of us has a part to play, a special part written especially for us, with our own unique character, tone quality, and talents in mind. The only way to fulfill the will of God, our conductor, is to play our given part, the one composed just for us.
Does this mean we are confined to a rigid score? No, there’s room for improvisation, for jazz—as long as we perform it at the right time, and in our own unique tone and style. No imitation, fakery, or phoniness is allowed; we are designed to be genuine.
If you are a back-bench violinist, you may feel at times that all you are doing is sawing away. But somewhere up above the stars, the angels are entranced by your music.
If you are one of those whose score is composed almost entirely of rests, are you resting well? Are you content simply to turn pages for a while? And are you alert and listening so that you can come in at the right time?
Moses was prepared for his ministry by forty years alone in the wilderness, and then even his ministry was comprised of forty more years in the wilderness.
If you are a cymbalist, you might have to wait a long, long time before delivering your one big crash.
This picture of the symphony orchestra is, of course, analogous to Paul’s comparison of the body of Christ to the human body: “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, so it is with Christ … Now if the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ it would not for that reason stop being part of the body … But God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as He wanted them to be, so there are many parts, but one body” (1 Cor 12:12 ff).
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