Every once in a while, I come upstairs when my husband is working on an extra project and just watch and listen to him work. He’ll hum a few notes to himself, click the mouse, play a chord or a melody line. It sounds so disjointed, honestly. There doesn’t seem much rhyme or reason or anything musical about it. Just an audible snippet here or there that might clue you in to a measure of a song or a taste of the melody. It seems like a dab of random with a whole lot more silence than what you’d think making an entire orchestration would be. But when he is done, and he pushes the button, suddenly it’s there: the entire song, with strings and brass and woodwinds. Percussion. The whole gamut.
But all you heard?
A hum or two.
My word. Isn’t that the way life is?
You want to trust the Orchestrator… but try as you might, you don’t get to hear the music in his head. You get dazzled by a pretty chord that escapes the keys, or distracted by a weird note that gets clicked in. But more than anything, you wonder how any beautiful music can come from long, long stretches of silence. It’s unnerving.
I think we all long to hear the music. To see how all the measures are going to play out. To see if there are some nice themes and repeating parts. I know I do. We want to hear all the parts together.
It’s hard to be patient with the process of creation.
It takes trust. Trust that the Orchestrator hears and knows it all in his head… and that each note is deliberately placed. The tempo is strategic.
It is so comforting to know that one day, we will finally get to hear the final piece… and we are even the music itself. We will be awed, not just by the song, but by the One who placed every. single. note. in it.
So listen closely. Catch what you can.
But rest in the fact the music will not be silent forever.
embracing essentialism 