Recognizing Brilliance

Today in church Pastor Mark shared a story that I thought was very telling of my life. Maybe you can relate. Here's how it goes (parts of this are me summarizing, and the parts in italics are unapologetically plagiarized from here:

Two years ago an experiment was conducted. Joshua Bell, one of the finest violin virtuosos that walks the planet, dressed in average street clothes, took a 1713 Stradivarius to the subway in Washington DC. He opened his case toward the crowd, and tossed some change in just to get things going. For 43 minutes he played some of the finest and complex music that has ever tickled the eardrums of man. The acoustics of the subway station turned out to be surprisingly good, according to the man who regularly fills the biggest & most famous concert halls of the world.

During that 43 minutes, exactly 1,097 people passed by. What was the reaction? In the words of Bell himself, "It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ." The word doesn't come easily. ". . . ignoring me." Bell is laughing. It's at himself. "At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute. The final tally for the nickels & dimes tossed his was was $32.17. Some people rudely even flipped a few quarters at him (not at his case).

As it happens, exactly one person recognized Bell, and she didn't arrive until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, there was no doubt. She doesn't know much about classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier, at Bell's free concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn't about to miss it.

Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center. She had a huge grin on her face. The grin, and Furukawa, remained planted in that spot until the end.

The take home metaphor is simple. How often do we fail to recognize, appreciate, & marvel at the glory of the Creator of the universe, whose Symphony is constantly being played out amongst us? For myself, I should more often sit - front and center - with a huge grin on my face and in my heart, marveling at the glorious things God is doing right in front of me.