The Harvest Symphony

The symphony spreads out across the honey colored stage. The strings in their multiple rows, like so many birds on a wire. The woodwinds in dutiful roosting pairs, the brass in full plumage and shine under the stage spotlights. The percussion hides in the back, a piano and a host of other invisible and striking calls. The platform waits for the conductor as the concertmaster arrives and all is silent. They all have a specific role and all must execute it with precision.

The oboe gives the tuning note and all the assembled align themselves with that center and wait. The conductor approaches the platform in a wave of applause. He raises his baton and cues the first notes.

A motif is a very small idea, repeated pattern, or symbol within a work. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is famous for the four note rhythm of fate, repeated amazingly through the works whole. So imagine if you will, that the music performed, has a physical object to represent the motif, such as a ping-pong ball, that each musician takes and balances for its part before handing it off to the next person. If that analogy is clear, imagine that motif as a human being, carefully passed throughout the orchestra family.

A composer purposefully writes the notes, say C-E-F-G, as his motif. He’ll give it to the 1st flute, then the 3rd Horn. It jumps to the string section in a rising motion, till it’s handed to the 1st bassoon for a haunting moment. Then it’s taken by the whole woodwind section in a mini-octet. Then a solo cello takes the C-E-F-G and slows it way down. Then all the cellos, violas, and basses begin to ominously grow the passage. It grows and the trombone section joins, with the flutes and oboes’ adding the C-E-F-G in extreme octaves to be heard over the rumble below. Then the whole symphony brings it home… ending with a lone instrument repeating the C-E-F-G mantra once more and the whole work is complete.

This is a great analogy to the true Christian life in dealing with sowing and harvests. Someone comes into your life and you realize you are to sow a seed of faith or minister to a seed in this person’s life. The sowing of the C-E-F-G begins. Then that person leaves, moves on, or you become disconnected. Suddenly someone else is ministering, watering what you planted. Then someone else is given the opportunity to reiterate the C-E-F-G passage in their life. Then someone in a different city has this person and they unknowingly join the chorus of C-E-F-G to this person. Before long there is a distinct path of this motif through a wide circle of people. If we only knew the people we are connected with by merely playing a motif in someone’s symphonic journey to knowing Christ!

 

Maybe I’m going overboard here, but this was made obvious and very beautiful to me. I was sent a girl I didn’t know if I could help. I kept speaking the same message to her. I could see the long list of people before me that had already spoken to her of Christ and already planted seeds that resulted in knowledge, but not a revelation of Jesus.

Others joined me in speaking and praying for this person. Soon a small army was assembled. Then God removed my turn with the motif entirely. It would be easy to be sad because she was so close to a life decision for Jesus, but that would defeat the composer’s intention and purpose.

I moved on and the girl passed to another’s care. Then another’s. And then another’s who had the privilege of seeing a true decision made for Christ and the slow but sure steps toward the renewal in Jesus. I was able to see this as one who came along near the harvest and knew those God chose to be there for this person.  I was allowed to see the web of connections as people ministered and tended the seed of faith in this person.

To me it made a lovely image of the symphony in the Father’s household. To see God’s own responding to the notes needed and playing the C-E-F-G each in turn was like sitting before a great orchestral performance. There was no competition or rushing, but a lovely melody of in-tune actions responding the conductor’s cues, knowing the melody well enough to respond with C-E-F-G accurately and faithfully.

Perhaps this only resonates with me and my musical obsession, but to those who have tended a person with a C-E-F-G continuo and have seen no response; or those that can’t wait for someone to take over the motif, or to those who lost touch with such a seed of faith, take joy!

Our Conductor is never out of time and is ever clear in his cues if we’re paying attention. He knows the symphony each seed needs and will pass that motif to others as needed, bringing those He’s calling to Himself to a grand finale as only He can orchestrate. Take joy in your part in the motif, knowing he’ll pass it on to the next section to water, to tend, to fertilize, and eventual harvest. Whatever part you play, take joy in the symphony of our Conductor’s harvest.

 

 (Photo credit: http://languagefeatures.weebly.com)