Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.
Deuteronomy 6:5-6 (NIV)
God Asks for Everything
Forty kids in one room, and the brass comes in half a beat early every time until the director stops them and they run it again. Marching band works on repetition. Nobody has to feel anything about measure nineteen for measure nineteen to come out clean.
There’s a trumpet player who’s late to every rehearsal. She comes in during the warm-up, gets her horn up by the second run-through, and plays her part without a wrong note in it. By October the whole show is memorized, and half of them couldn’t tell you what the music is supposed to be about.
God asks Israel for all of it. All the heart, all the soul, all the strength, said to people standing at the edge of a country they’ve been promised, before a single foot has crossed.
Heart and soul and strength come to all there is of a man. God sends the commandments to the heart, to the place where you settle what you want.
The drill works on the kids who love it and on the kids who signed up because a fifth class was required. From the stands you can’t tell them apart. The late trumpet player plays her part as clean as the girl who hasn’t missed a rehearsal in four years.
God wants the direction of a life, and you can turn without feeling much at the moment you turn. But all is the word he uses, and all of a person is more than the part of them that plays clean. Israel heard what to aim the whole of themselves at, and they heard it while the country was still a promise.
She comes in nine minutes late again, and this time the director stops the band mid-phrase and holds them there with both hands up until she has the horn at her mouth. Forty of them wait. Her part is the same part either way, and he won’t start the phrase without her in it.
A Prayer to Remember
We’ve got a day in front of us and not much feeling to bring to it. You’ve asked for everything we are, and this is what’s here. Take it, and put your words where we make our decisions. We’d rather be given the wanting than work it up on our own.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
