Saturday, October 27, 2012

Harmony

My prayer buddy, a local missionary, recently visited the States and when she returned she brought me the new Passion CD, White Flag. I am totally hooked on the song "10,000 Reasons (Bless the LORD)"  I was worshipping to it on my IPod while I watched the kids swim around the pool this afternoon.  
Before we went back into the house, I stopped to talk to my guard. He is a lover of GOD and I knew he would really enjoy the song, too.  So, I passed him my headphones and told him I wanted him to hear a great song.  He was amazed by the IPod and so I spent a moment introducing him to the technology. (They still use tapes here...if you don't know what a tape is, I am not sure you're old enough to be using the internet unsupervised.)  
Eventually, he positioned the headphones on his head and I started the music.  I let him listen while I walked nearby and sat down on the front steps to wait.   It was only a minute or so into the song when he'd already caught onto the tune and was singing aloud, "Bless the LORD, Oh my soul. Ohhh my soul. Worship HIS HOLY NAME. Sing like never before. Oh my soul! Worship HIS HOLY NAME" 
I sang along quietly with tears stinging my eyes.  We've lived here 10 months and I still cannot believe I get to be with these beautiful people.  
When he finished the song, he brought it back to me and gushed, "That was really great!! Here, we do all our songs with just a keyboard and drums. But that song had all the instruments!!" He was overwhelmed.

There it is.

Immediately, my heart was again reminded of a truth that burns within me.  The body of JESUS is like an orchestra.  The whole orchestra isn't in one place, in one location.  My guard's church has the keyboard and drums, maybe mine has the violin.  Maybe yours has the flute.  Where we go wrong in this life called CHRISTianity is that we find what we like and what we believe and when we figure that out, figure out that we are a clarinet, well then we find other clarinets to worship with us and teach us and fellowship with us.  We cheer: Hooray for clarinets! We can start to think that clarinets are really the way GOD likes HIS music played. And HE does like it!  
Perhaps we can get to where we acknowledge that GOD uses other instruments like the violins down the street, or the weirdo holy rollin' tambourines across town. We can smile sweetly while we listen to the other instruments and we say things like, "Bless their hearts." We might even mean that. We might have fellowship with the other instruments but can we come to the realization that
 GOD wants us to actually play together?
Not just be able to acknowledge or hear other instruments, but to actually play along in harmony?  
What if we could accept that we are clarinets and not violins but that we need the violin to make HIS music correctly. To know that the clarinet won't sound as good without the violin and the oboe and the harp and the piano? We need each other to make the really great music that GOD wants the world, and us, to hear.  

Oh how beautiful it would sound!!  




1 comment:

  1. beautiful analogy. I LOVE that song....we have nearly played a hole in that CD.

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