lines and dots

I don't have time to blog, so clearly I'm blogging.

I'm sitting in my piano room, a place that I'm in more than any other place besides my bed (sometimes). And I won't sugarcoat it all. I'm spent. My recital is in two weeks and I'd just like to say that if you enjoy crying at least once a week, having no time to hang out with anyone, and don't care much about personal care issues, like eating or showering regularly, then preparing a senior piano recital is the path for you!

Everyone's complaining about the snow, and I'm stuck complaining about this. This room with puke-colored carpet and depressingly blank walls that I'm sure will give me nightmares once I'm out of it for good. Part of me likes the depressing weather; at least mother Earth is on the same page as me.

I've missed blogging. Writing. Words. If I didn't have a boyfriend that called me regularly, words would be almost as rare as free time. I anxiously await the day that I can read, that I can write. That words will become more prevalent. I wanted to blog about Choir Tour number one, about Easter, about things I am learning. And I cannot wait (if you only knew the little dregs of patience I'm scraping desperately at the bottom of my barrel) to start writing again. I miss the clicks of this typing. I miss creating sentences. Ideas.

I went on a second choir tour last weekend with some freshman girls and it wasn't as emotionally shattering nor miserable as the first one. It was nice to pour into those girls and get to know people I'd never taken the time (because I don't have much of it) to get to know. As I was accompanying one of their songs, I found myself struck by just how silly music looks. Show it to a five year-old, and what would they say?

Lines and dots.

Lines and dots, that's all it is.


And isn't that all our world is? I've got two hazel dots on my big dot of a face, with two arm lines coming out of a thicker line we call a torso. All we are, our whole world. We are just lines and dots.

But we know better. Just as music is so much more than lines and dots--we know there are dynamics, key changes, emotions, builds, stories that are behind music. It is complex and breathtaking, and so is our world, despite its simplistic makeup of...lines. And dots.

What turns these lines and dots into something deeper? What gives the music its feeling and its power? Is it in that dot with a line through it that elementary students first learn as Middle C? Or is it in the musician--the one who presses that Middle C, sometimes softly, sometimes boldly. Sometimes smoothly, sometimes quickly. Middle C's meaning is not in what it looks like; it is in its sound when it is played by someone. Middle C does nothing. Middle C plays when someone decides to make Middle C mean something more than just a dot.

Friends, we are nothing. Nothing but lines and dots. But the Great Musician (whom I am relying on for strength to get me through until my recital) sees us, and He sees how He can make us sound. It is in Him that the mundane things of life have meaning, because He is playing them. When the piano seems like just lines and dots and is blurred through stressed tears, I can rest in the truth that He makes it mean something. He makes music from the lines and dots of our lives, and there is power in that.

We are but a note in His Redemption Song. A song that will go on without us if we refuse to be apart of it. Others have been played before us, others will be played after our note stops ringing. But we must remember who we are without Him. Just lines and dots. Nothing but jibberish on a page. Until He plays us. He gives us meaning. He gives our lives meaning and our single note is important when He plays us, along with a grand symphony that proclaims His glory and tells of His Redemption. 

It's humbling, it's helping. A little. Two weeks until I won't know what to do with myself.