For Wilshire Baptist Church
I was watching football on Saturday night – not so much watching as listening while doing other things. It was Iowa State and Houston, and talking about one of the players on one of the teams, the announcer said, “He’s as consistent as a metronome.”
That’s an analogy I’ve never heard in athletics before, but as one who played in the band in high school, briefly in college and now in Wilshire Winds, I understood what the announcer was saying: the player is steady, he is unwavering, he can be trusted. Taking it a little further, you might say he is always watching and listening – to coaches, to teammates, to the refs. And, pardon the pun, but when he’s running a route or running a coverage, he’s always on time.
As a musician, I can relate to all the layers of that analogy. A metronome – a mechanical or electronic device that is set to produce an audible click or tone at a uniform interval – is good to have when we need to know the tempo a piece of music is set to by the composer. And if we’re playing in a group, a metronome can help the entire group play together. When I was in high school, our band director occasionally would get so frustrated with us he’d put a microphone up to the electronic metronome and broadcast the “click-click-click” through the giant band hall speakers. It was so loud it felt like we were getting beat on the head with the rhythm, but it got our attention, and it got us playing together.
Still, there’s a fundamental problem with attaching the concept of a metronome to a life situation whether it’s athletics or something else. A metronome is great to have if you’re learning to play a Sousa march or any other piece with a steady tempo from start to finish. But a lot of music we hear or play, including music we play in Wilshire Winds, has varying tempos within the piece — from slow adagios to speedy allegros. The tempo changes give music character and interest. They keep music from being boring or predictable. They give music life.
Likewise, our lives are rarely lived at a consistent tempo. Some days we’re racing fast, some days we’re walking, and sometimes we’re barely moving at all. Sometimes we can choose the tempo we want to live at for a while at least, but often the tempo is forced on us by circumstances and we have to be ready to speed up to keep up or slow down so we don’t miss something important.
For example, this week I’ve had to slow down my life due to an automotive repair that I thought would be a one-day event but is now in the fourth day. We have another car so we’re not without transportation, but like many households, ours is often geared toward us both being out and about. So for now we have to make sure appointments and commitments don’t overlap; one of us has to slow down and wait while the other is out moving at whatever tempo is required.
It’s a minor inconvenience compared to other life interruptions, like last summer when the tempo of our life was dictated by the schedule of daily cancer treatments. Five days a week for seven weeks we had to be up early and out in a hurry for appointments, and when we got there, we usually had to slow down and wait. Still, none of that compares to what tens of millions of people are enduring in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Reading the news and seeing the images, the prospect of life moving again at anything more than a crawl seems impossible. But in time – in God’s time – life will begin to move again at a familiar tempo.
And that’s the key whether in life or in music: knowing who is keeping time. In music, in the absence of a metronome, we look to the conductor to mark the tempo with their hands or a baton. In life, we can trust the living God who puts air in our lungs and fills our spirit with music – whether it’s actual music or the music of life – to lead us forward in unison, in harmony, or in whatever the situation requires.