| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 21 |
Page 5 |
If only we understood it we should see that the rests which God writes into the bars of our life are necessary to make the music perfect. We think we have lost time when we have been sick for a season. No; the passive duty of the sick days, when we were shut away from the hurrying world, the duty of being quiet and patient and trustful, was quite as sacred and important as were the urgent duties of the days of health.
“How does the musician read the rest? See him beat the time unerring count and catch up the next note true and steady as if no breaking place had come between. Not without design does God write the music of our lives. Be it ours to learn the tune and not be dismayed at the rests. They are not to be slurred over, are not to be omitted, and are neither to destroy the melody nor to change the key note. If we look up, God himself will beat the time for us.” It is not ours to write the score; it is ours only to sing or play it as God has written it. We have no right to change a note or a point, to insert a rest or to omit one. We must play it as it is given to us.
When in our life we come to rests which are written for us into the great Composer’s score, we should consider them just as much part of the music as are the notes in the other bars. We need not complain of loss of time in illness, in forced leisure, in frustrated efforts, nor fret that our voice had to be silent, our part missing in the music. There was no real loss in these breaks or pauses. We do our duty best by not trying to do anything when God bids us to lie still. We need not fret that we cannot be active for God when clearly God does not want us to be active. She was a submissive Christian, and had learned well the secret of peace and the meaning of the rests, who accounted for her peaceful quiet on her sick bed by saying, “I hear God saying to me, ‘Lie here and cough.’” That was God’s will for her then instead of the bidding to active service which she used to hear and obey so gladly in the days of strength. The truest life is the one that takes the music as God writes it, without question, believing in his love and his wisdom, sure that he is right.
“In the grand oratorios of life
God writes us unexpected rests!
These break the rash, the strain, the storm, the strife,
And are our surely needful tests!
How these are kept, not reaching for the next,
Nor clinging to the former strain,
In perfect waiting, listening for the text
To make the Master’s meaning plain,
Proves, or disproves, our individual skill.
“Some high, some low, some intermediate sing;
Each voice is needful in its part,
Though one, in solo, rise on peerless wing–
Lost in the chorus, one!
An art Divinely wise, brings, here and there, a rest.
And he–I’d tell it o’er and o’er–
Sings best, who, losing self, interprets best,
In notes, or rests, throughout the score,
The Master’s grand, eternal, loving will.”
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