The Full Story

I won the lottery this week and was chosen to play on the worship team at church. During band rehearsal on Tuesday, I kept thinking I wanted to take a video to document this strange Pandemic/church experience so I could look back on it in years to come. Finally, during a quiet moment, I stopped playing, got out my phone, and took a video of the three worship leaders singing together with the rest of the band playing along.

As soon as I stopped the video, put my phone in my pocket, and started playing the keyboard again, I realized:

That video will be terrible.

See, at our church, we use in-ear monitors, which allows us to control what we each hear. These monitors (glorified earbuds) are designed to block out other sounds, which means that us musicians frequently don’t know what else is going on in the room. And during this particular part of the rehearsal, the main auditorium speakers were off. So the sound was only in our ears and whatever could be heard naturally (drums and some very quiet vocals, given the size of the room.) What sounded in my ears like a beautiful song, with all these different parts and balanced noise, was just a vague echo in the video.

If you’ve been around here a while, I’m guessing you already know where I’m going with this. If you guess correctly, please tell me, and I shall send you a Reeses Cup. (It will take approximately 12-18 weeks to arrive, but they have a long shelf life.)

Okay so here it is:

If you watched the video, you would be unimpressed, and likely confused about what was even happening. You certainly wouldn’t think it was something worth documenting for years to come. The difference is that you can’t hear the same sound I do.

You don’t have the full story. And without the full story, you have a completely different experience from me.
How often do I do this in life? I look at something, a person, a situation (someone tailgating me on the highway, por exemplo) and I make a judgment based on the information I have (that they’re an idiot.) But I don’t have the full story.

What would it look like for each of us to pause and ponder, “what parts of this story am I missing?” How can we embrace, in our day-to-day lives, the reality that we don’t hear what the person next to us hears?

No, I’m really asking. What would that look like?