God’s bigger picture...
I remember when the choir teacher passed out the different
singing parts and we started to break them down and rehearse them. The song was
“I’ll be home for Christmas” and I was singing bass. When the director got
around to the basses and played the part we would be singing I was perplexed. (“This
doesn’t sound like the song!”) In fact, I observed, neither did the alto and soprano part.
We were all singing a strange form of the melody and putting words in odd
places in the phrase. It just didn’t sound right. I was a little frustrated,
because I always wanted to sing beautiful melodies. I wanted to sing songs like
the singers I heard on the radio. I fancied myself a pretty good vocalist and
now, I was having to sing these strange parts of this perfectly good song.
I can’t help but think this is often the low elevation way we regard our world and
our individual part in it. At a young age we start to get an idea of what we’d
like to be or do in this world and our dreams are seldom modest in scope. Little do
we know that not only is life going to sidetrack us and throw obstacles in our
way, but it will turn out to be something totally different than we expected.
And it’s a rare thing to end up playing a part as grand as our youthful vision
had in mind.
As it turned out, when at last our choir teacher had
rehearsed all the different parts of the song with the different sections, and
we all put it together, the combination sounded wonderful. The harmonies blended
into a whole that none of us envisioned when we started out. The experience of
adding your part to a whole and creating something beautiful, complicated and
worthy is humbling and exhilarating.
God is like a brilliant composer. He has a great and lengthy
vision for this world and our lives and parts in it. Only He can see past the
horizon to what lies ahead. You can see this in the relationship between what
we call the Old Testament and the New Testament. We are like ants in Time
Square dreaming huge dreams of conquest. If we would just teach ourselves to quiet our world and listen to the
Spirit and allow ourselves to be led by Him, we might find our small part fills
a great need in the greater picture. Our culture tells us that we can be
whatever we set our hearts and minds to. That sounds wonderful at first. But in
the process of “dreaming” if we ignore God and turn our backs on His design
and great plan, we risk working against Him. Indeed, most of the problems we
face in this world are a result of us trying to blaze our own trail instead of
seeking God’s direction. We are then as sheep who ignore our shepherd and leave
the fields to find our own way. That can be frustrating at best and deadly at
worst.
Only in God is my soul at rest. Ps 62
No comments:
Post a Comment