God's Masterpiece--Your Life!

I wrote a song of prayer my senior year of high school. It was called, “Dear God.” I played it on the piano and recorded a rough version of it to share with family and friends.

Eventually, I decided to sing it in a youth talent contest hosted by our church. A friend of mine was a brilliant pianist and a music major at the University of Buffalo. I gave him the cassette to listen to with the hopes that he could arrange it and then accompany me as I sang it.

I’ll never forget the night I went to meet him at the UB practice studios. As I walked down the hall toward the room where we’d agreed to meet, I heard this beautiful piano piece. It was haunting, powerful, and intricate.

I stopped and soaked it in. It took me a minute to recognize that this beautiful music was the song I had written. He had turned it into a masterpiece.

I was overwhelmed.

God--the Great Composer of Your Life

In many ways, my experience with my own song is a metaphor for a Christian's experience with life. We do our best to make good plans and carry them out. We have hopes, dreams, ideas, and schemes. Some are very good...others, not so much. Still, we pursue them with great passion.

When we come to faith, we turn those plans over to God--just like I turned my song over to my friend the composer (Prov. 3:5-6). That's scary. "What if He doesn't like it?" we think. Or, "What if he changes it all around or does something weird with it?" We worry about what might be--normally with a lack of faith or understanding of how great, fair, or powerful God really is.

But then--the unveiling. God reveals His plan or we start to see the fruit of what we've been led to do. We are amazed and humbled by His Sovereign power and ability. We recognize that all that worry was for nothing--He really DID have our best interest at heart (Jer 29:11).

I only we had trusted Him completely to begin with....

To that end,

Pastor Joel