"B-flat........................"

Monday was probably the most stressful of any yet this year. One of the younger children in our unit was gone last week on some sort of trip with his parents, the sudden return to “business as usual” no doubt a rude awakening. What’s more: his dissatisfaction with the situation he found himself in only tended to stir up others in the room and for six and a half hours our space knew no peace, unhappy campers voicing their anger with gusto, often all at the same time. Physical displays, screaming, blubbering – I thought it amusing, having escaped for a few minutes to take one boy to his music class, to find a poster on the teacher’s wall stating: “You can’t make harmony if everybody is singing the same note!” It well applied to the symphony being written upstairs; but, to be truthful, my mind has been chewing on its wording ever since, for I believe it speaks to the Church every bit as much as it does to forming a choir… The term we hear preached from the pulpit is “unity”; and certainly there is a Biblical endorsement for the people of God to seek such condition within the body. How we usually tend to envision achieving that quality, however, is in terms of everyone being in agreement, all of us “cloned” in our thinking, one in our vision. Yet, with the Creator being greater than any definition we attempt to assign Him and humanity being the greatest illustration of diversity ever achieved, the only possible hope we might have of “unity” is through being “blended together”, something that the Apostle Paul refers to as being “tempered together” by the Holy Ghost, a state I find, by the way, to be temporal in so far as we are concerned, a moment possible when and wherever two or three are gathered in His name, but subject to gradual loss once separated from the submersion. Even so, “harmony” has a sweet sound when it happens……