The Whole Picture

The other day I was listening to classical music while driving (it keeps me calm). Anyway, I was listening to a piece and could hear all sorts of noise followed by bursts of laughter during the performance. It was odd, but whatever.

It wasn't until later I realized I didn't have the whole story.

I was only listening to the piece. If I had been watching it I would have seen something completely different. You can see what I mean here. The entire orchestra leaves the stage one by one until there are only two musicians remaining.

But that's still not the whole picture. The story makes the difference. This piece has been performed this way for over 200 years with the orchestra leaving the stage. This is the Farewell symphony by Haydn. Haydn was a hired conductor for Prince Esterhazy in the late 1700's. And his orchestra was hired too, but they usually got the summers off to go home and visit their family. The Prince was keeping them a little later than Haydn wanted so he wrote this piece as a hint to his boss "hey, it's time to go home, we're all leaving."

Too often we only see a little piece and think we know it all. Sometimes we only know a piece of what's going on. Many times we only know pieces of who God is. We need to take a step back and realize we don't know the whole story, or even better, put in the time and effort to learn the whole story.

*silently leaves his chair*

T