Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Staff Paper

I love listening to music, I love piano, violin, and cello to be exact and I love anything that is supposed to be classical but is put into main stream music. I love listening to the sweet melodies, followed by the dark and foreboding ones. My heart feels as if it comes alive when I hear the sound of music and I have become thoroughly addicted to it. It's presence peeks out when studying, showering, walking, and strangely in unison with my Chemistry class in lab and recitation.

So many unspoken languages seep through when someone composes a piece. All feelings of loneliness, anger, melancholy, despair, joy, love, exuberance, and passion, saturate the sheet music speaking another language that only the heart and imagination can fully comprehend. It seems that we know when it is being spoken, but so often we have no idea what this language is saying. Our heart flutters, our minds soar and we draw deep into ourselves.

Well, for me music is the tangible example of my relationship with God. My life is one giant piece of staff paper. There have been so many times when my past has spoken of dark, dreary, and despairing times and during those sections I can hear the bass, short and spastic, breaking into the deep abodes of my anguish. I can hear the pounding of the piano keys as I yelled, threw things, and sobbed in the bed sheets grabbing onto to anything with such vehemence that my knuckles grew pale white. There have been times in my past that sing of joy, such joy that it cannot be bottled no matter how many containers the world provides. In those areas, the staff paper informs the flutes to tweet and twirl their notes in the air in a secret dance, the violins to burst into long, sweet strokes of young girls running through fields and the bells and xylophones to sound out the laughter of family and friends. And I know that when I meet my husband, our song will be a beautiful sync between the firm and authoritative voice of a tenor sax and the encouraging, heart-lightening love of a piccolo. We'll make a beautiful duo with our voices, even better that Joshua Radin in his many duets (if that's even possible), and it will be composed by God, the One saying "these two will work beautifully, this will make gorgeous sound, play for me".

Yet, when my life is average I cannot find the inspiring music that I express with my ups and downs. When my life is simply going through the motions and I have no passion my musical song stops. The drums quit pounding, the guitars break rhythm, and the saxophones screech. When my life isn't full throttle for God (encompassing risk, hurt, inexplicable joy, and laughter) then it becomes a dull, bland, uneventful, and uninteresting waste. My music stops and in those moments so does my living.

God is the composer of our songs, but if we don't let Him compose chaos occurs, the violins play one beat, the cellos another, the bass something despairing, the violas something chirpy and there is discord, not melody. When we don't let Him compose and lead the entire song, the music stops and noise ensues. God will direct our song for us, He will fill the staff paper with endless notes, ones that make us come alive, that speak to the very fibers of our being, that coax out the best of us, but we cannot become complacent, refusing to play, and we cannot try to take control, claiming to know more about the way the song should sound.

I am so excited to hear the final piece of my song when I stand before Him.  To cry in His lap during the dark parts and to dance with Him in the melodious, sweet sections. I'm excited to hear the songs of my brothers and sisters and I can only hope that when we get to the end our songs will be long and full of life as He has called us to live.

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