After two mostly sleepless nights due to a sick child, I finally got to sleep long enough to have dreams. But then I was rudely awakened by a nightmare: I was running late to the church service, and dashed to the piano and grabbed the list of songs and the hymnbook laying there nearby, but it was the wrong version. The listed numbers didn't lead to the right hymns. The words could be forced to fit, but the melody was wrong. I reached over to grab another hymnbook, but it wouldn't lay flat and stay open. I woke up with my heart racing.
Sometimes when things don’t work out as expected, we are too stiff and inflexible and the whole thing turns into a nightmare. What if we tried, instead, to see all the possibilities open before us?
On string instruments, there are multiple ways to play the same note. A cello has four strings, and you can play the same note on two different strings by putting your fingers in different positions. The choice of string to use depends on what notes you are playing before and after, for ease in fingering, and also on what tone is best for that note. Each string sounds slightly different. This was a difficult thing for me as a pianist to learn, since a piano only has one key per note. I wasn’t used to thinking of multiple possibilities.
Sometimes God tells us to do something that seems totally opposite of what we are used to doing, like when God told Philip to travel away from Jerusalem instead of toward it. Sometimes we may have to do or explain things in a way we’ve never thought of before, in order to reach someone very different from us. At such times, perhaps we can play a different melody with the old words. On the cello, there is only one way to play the lowest note, a low C. Some truths can and should never be changed. But for everything else, flexibility opens all new windows and doors of opportunity.
Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake (which means “queen of the Ethiopians”). This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”…
Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.
Acts 8:26-29,35