Last week my children participated in a ten-day music camp. My son, a cello player, was handed a stack of 15 songs to learn about a week before the camp began. Every day he worked hard learning to play his part. Once my son was able to play the songs, I wanted to make sure he had learned them correctly. While listening to him play each song, there were several times I questioned the notes he was playing. “Surely this isn’t correct!” I would say to him. To figure out where the problem was, I would play his part on the piano while he played his part on the cello. To my surprise, he had learned his part correctly. “Well that sounds odd but you learned it right,” I found myself saying.
While my son was learning his cello part, my daughter was learning her violin part for the same songs.
Something amazing happened when they began to play their parts together. Suddenly my son’s cello part didn’t sound odd anymore. In fact, the notes went from sounding wrong and out of place, to sounding melodic and beautiful. The beauty didn’t end there! Once the cello and violin parts were placed with the entire orchestra at camp, it sounded amazing!
While you probably aren’t playing an instrument in an orchestra, perhaps you can relate.
In life, we can get discouraged when things don’t make sense from our perspective. Maybe you think God has given you the wrong personality type for the task He has asked you to complete. Perhaps you feel you are wasting your days waiting for God’s direction. Maybe you find yourself in a situation that is less than desirable because of someone else’s actions. Life just doesn’t make sense.
What if my son had changed the part he was to play to something that sounded more beautiful by itself? What if he had questioned the arranger’s intentions and refused to learn it? Learning the cello part, even when it sounded wrong, took faith. Faith that the arranger and composer had a plan he didn’t know about. It is similar in life. We must learn to trust when we don’t see the big picture, and trust when the part we have been given to play seems strange and doesn’t fit. After all, the one who is orchestrating it all knows the beautiful music that will arise when we each play our part. So if you find yourself playing a cello part that seems odd and doesn’t fit, don’t give up. Have faith that the music the creator has orchestrated will sound beautiful when He conducts it.
“Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.” – Corrie Ten Boom
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