Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Playing Second Fiddle





Any musicians out there reading this? I'm a musician--I've been playing the violin for forever, the piano for half of forever, and a couple of other instruments in my spare time. I've played in an orchestra like the one above, and it's a lot of fun. Everyone works together to create a beautiful sound. The conductor leads (waves his arms around and hopes everyone is watching him, which never happens), and everyone plays the right notes at the right time.
Being in an orchestra, it's a lot of fun to play first violin. You get the melody and the coolest parts. Most of the time. But most symphony orchestras have about 104 musicians in them, and only 12-16(ish) of those are first violin. Which leaves a lot of us to play another part. Second fiddle, if you will. (by that, I mean, all the other instruments--it's an expression). In an orchestra, this makes perfect sense--not everyone can play the same notes. It wouldn't sound good. It would be really boring. When everyone does their part, it sounds good. Only when everyone does their part does it sound the way it is supposed to.

The Christian life is a lot like that. I'm thinking about a church. With all the people in the church, not everyone can be front and center. We all have to do our part to make the body of Christ work like it needs to. Most of us end up doing "second fiddle" jobs--jobs that may not be seen by others but need to be done. Face it--no one notices the third trumpet in the back row of the orchestra. But if he doesn't come in on that obligato trumpet solo, everyone is going to realize something's wrong. We need to be faithful in the little things we have to do. It's called being committed. It's almost a dirty word in churches today. But just like in the orchestra, we all have a part to play. We need to watch our conductor as He leads us. Keep your eyes on Him. And play whatever part He has given you!

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