Read Romans 12

One of the most rewarding things I have ever done has been to work on digitally recording some of Beethoven’s works, including Piano Trio’s Number 5 and 6. In order to do this, I had to learn how to read and interpret really complex sheet music. It was a daunting task at first, but the more and more I worked at it and researched it, the more and more I began to have an understanding of not just the sheet music but of music theory itself.

One of the most amazing things to me was recording the movements of the trios, part by part. First I would record the piano parts. Then I would record the violin followed by the cello parts. During the recording of each part I could hear the beauty, the heart and soul, that was poured into it during its composition. Each part is uniquely beautiful and breathtaking; each part could be a song unto itself.

Then there came the point in the recording where it was time to piece the parts together, followed by the first time listening to all the parts play together. What can be said about it? There are no words in the English language, or any other language for that matter, that would adequately describe the feeling of hearing the harmony of three unique parts blending together to make the full measure of a movement of music! What more, there came the time where I completed all of the movements in the piano Trio, followed by my listening for the first time to all of the movements in the trio! WOW! My goodness, what genius does it take to compose such divinely beautiful music?

It is natural for us, as Christians, to get caught up in what we are doing. And often what we are doing coincides with what our local church communities are doing; therefore, it is often that we as Christians find ourselves working together in the larger context of our local churches and our local communities. But it is also safe to say that by getting caught up in what we are doing we often miss the beauty of the whole movement that God is composing and orchestrating.

We tend to lose sight that God’s scope is much larger and broader than ours. We lose sight of the fact that God has many parts playing, each of them unique, beautiful and equally valuable; however, we also lose fact that no individual part, no matter how great or small, ever exceeds the beauty of the whole movement that God is composing and conducting. What’s more, there is no “whole movement” without all of the individual parts! A trio is not a trio as a duo or a solo. It takes all of the parts to make the whole.

God is not only calling us, on an individual basis, to serve Christ by serving others in the unique and important ways that we do; rather, God is also calling us to accept that others are playing their parts in ways that are just as important as the ways we are serving. God is calling us to recognize that though some of those ways look foreign, perhaps threatening to our ways of thinking, and even seem to contradict our understandings of things, it is God who has the full picture…not us. It is God who is composing and conducting the movement, not us. The challenge for us is to not see ourselves as the best part of God’s movement, or the part that leads God’s movement in the right direction. The challenge for us is to trust that God is in control of the orchestra, that God is the conductor and that God is at work in, through and in spite of all of the parts, composing the greatest masterpiece of all time!