It was as though...
Illustration
It was as though all the evil forces in the world had combined their opposition to the ministry of Jesus. The crowds were so demanding that they would not let him eat. His friends said, "He's out of his mind." His family pleaded with him to give up his mission and come home. Yet through it all, Jesus gently but firmly refused to be turned aside from the course he knew he must follow.
The great English composer Sir Edward Elgar spent three years working on his oratorio for orchestra and chorus, "The Dream of Gerontius." At the end of the original score he wrote, "This is the best of me. For the rest, I ate and drank and slept and loved and hated, like another; my life was as the vapor, and is not, but this I saw and knew; this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory." That was a composer's testimony to a musical work that he felt was given by divine inspiration, that had laid hold on him and driven him to complete it.
Elgar's words echo those of Jesus when he spoke to Nicodemus, who came to him by night: "We speak what we do know and testify to what we have seen."
-- Stauderman
