Yesterday seemed to have very dissonant chords and unusual rhythm changes.  I like jamming but I’m not so good at improvising.  Dr. Chris Jones helped a lot this morning: https://mediastorage.cloversites.com/renovatuschurch/media_player/Act%203.mp3

I’m involved in a small committee and yesterday two members decided that it was best that they no longer be involved.  (excuse me, but I’m going to be deliberately vague in respect to the people involved) We had not done well in all working together.  This announcement was bittersweet for me.  There is a certain amount of pressure being lifted off in that we were struggling to work together, but definitely an amount of sadness in that we all failed to work it out. 

Yesterday would not have been the day to “work it out” and due to the maturity of everyone involved it was not ugly.  No, working it out is something that we all managed to not do on the way.  I’m convinced that God is as interested in the success of the committee becoming a loving family and effective leadership team as He is in the success of what we’re directing. So in that respect, yesterday felt like the stamp of “failure” at least in the part of team-building.  The fact that it happened with maturity and grace, though, allows me to think that it might have been simply an interesting plot twist in the improvised story that God and we are all acting out.

I’m a musician but I’m also a very ordered computer-geek as well.  Put those two together and I’m more likely to listen to Pachelbel’s Canon than Miles Davis.  Yesterday’s events feel dissonant to me like much of certain jazz styles.  The more predictable stuff, I can hang with, but when it gets out there, I’m lost.  But I know enough music to understand that Jazz DOES work and that it DOES have coherence but that the way it works and the coherence it demostrates looks nothing like Pachelbel’s Canon

The message from Dr. Chris Green this morning really helped me in that I’m understanding that Miles Davis and Charlie Parker may be more theologically sound than Pachelbel, Vivaldi and Bach.  Hard to stomach in the ordered world that I want and in my own struggles with the idiom of improvisation – both in music and in life – but I believe it’s a truth that’s hard to deny. 

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