Thelonius Sphere Monk "A marvelous sense of withdrawal"

Thelonius Sphere Monk- Excellent Jazz musician and mind-blowing pianist. I’ve been listening to Mr. Monk lately and I am thoroughly impressed by his off beat arrangements and ability to keep you guessing every time. So as I was driving the other day, I popped Mr. Monk in my CD player and gave myself to him as he took me on a journey with no known destination. Now I don’t usually listen to jazz in my car because………well, I don’t know why. I just usually don’t. However, when I was driving to work today with a concoction of a saxophone, piano, bass guitar and various melodious instruments swimming around my car, I had a thought. My mouth was silent. I was not singing along to somebody’s lyrics and I was not humming because I could not detect the path that the piano would take or where the saxophone would meet it. No one was coaching me with their lyrics telling my how I should feel at the moment, how I should act or what I should do. I was there. Just there in the silence listening to my thoughts and sinking myself into this flood of pure unadulterated harmony. And then I wondered about how many times God wants us to listen to Him like that. Silently and with nothing veiling us from His whispers and sometimes, loud bangs. How He yearns for our honest hearts instead of lyrics of memorized prayers. I wonder if He snaps his fingers to our prayers while smiling thinking “I’m not quite sure where this is going but I’m excited to find out.” Does He ache for new words and a new song? Or do we give the lover of our soul the same predictable words and the same complacent spirit?


I also thought about how we always complain about how we don’t know what God is doing at the moment. I would be lying if I said that I have not been haunted by this thought many times. However, as I was listening to Monk and his musicians, I discovered, “I don’t want to know what God is doing.” Despite of my impatience and my sin nature, I love that God always surprises me. I do not want a predictable God. I would never want the same answer to the same question. The same format to everything. I’d be bored. But Oh how we take our Savior for granted. We gripe and we moan that He is not answering us or He is silent. We run around wondering why He is not speaking to us the way we want. Why not just be still, smile, and snap to the unpredictable direction God is taking us? I refuse to ask God to be predictable. I want His silent whispers just as much as His loud bangs. His Thelonius Monk. His jazz.