{"id":1639,"date":"2022-05-13T10:10:37","date_gmt":"2022-05-13T14:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=1639"},"modified":"2022-05-13T10:10:37","modified_gmt":"2022-05-13T14:10:37","slug":"something-beautiful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/05\/13\/something-beautiful\/","title":{"rendered":"Something Beautiful"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Ugliness can give birth to beautiful things.
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It\u2019s difficult to overstate the ugliness of the Caribbean sugar cane plantations of the 18th<\/sup> and 19th<\/sup> centuries.\u00a0 African slaves were forced to work in brutal conditions so middle-class Europeans could spoon sugar into their cups of coffee and tea.\u00a0
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The slaves clung to as much of their indigenous culture as they could.\u00a0 That included drums, which had traditionally been central to communication in central and west Africa.\u00a0 Drum sequences were like text messages.\u00a0 One tribe might say to another, \u201cIt\u2019s going to rain soon,\u201d or \u201cThe council meeting will happen the day after tomorrow.\u201d\u00a0
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The nightly beating of drums in the New World terrified the plantation owners.\u00a0
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They had no means of cracking the percussion codes, and lived in terror of uprisings.\u00a0 Were the slaves using their drum riffs to plot revenge?\u00a0 Therefore the owners outlawed the playing of all musical instruments \u2013 a serious blow psychologically and spiritually to the slave communities.
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The slaves of Trinidad exploited a loophole by beating out rhythms on bamboo rods, forming so-called \u201ctamboo\u201d bands.\u00a0 They also experimented with bits of discarded metal.
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Long after the colonial era ended \u2013 and along with it the horrors of slavery \u2013 percussionists inherited an intriguing new source of sound.\u00a0 During World War II, American military quartermasters abandoned tens of thousands of empty oil drums around the Caribbean.\u00a0 Industrial waste was hardly what one would call a welcome gift.\u00a0 The barrels were worthless.\u00a0 But musical artists on Trinidad discovered that the dents, dings, and bulges on the metal surfaces produced various pitches when struck, and could be \u201ctuned\u201d to create whole scales.
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Thus an entirely new musical instrument was born.\u00a0 Today it\u2019s impossible to imagine \u201cisland music\u201d \u2013 calypso and reggae, in particular \u2013 without the distinctive tonalities of steel drums.
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Here\u2019s a local artist demonstrating that discarded trash can sometimes be transformed into something beautiful:\u00a0 Steel Drum – UB40 Red Red Wine by Dano’s Island Sounds – YouTube<\/a>
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The least becomes the greatest.\u00a0 The worthless becomes priceless.\u00a0 The overlooked becomes the key to the whole story.\u00a0<\/em>
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That subtheme reverberates in virtually every book of the Bible.\u00a0
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God creates human beings from dirt.\u00a0 The rag-tag descendants of a senior citizen become his Chosen People.\u00a0 The Israelites, knocked back and forth like a shuttlecock by the major powers of the ancient world, never seem to figure out how to obey God.\u00a0 The Messiah launches his global mission with twelve apprentices who are anything but the brightest and the best.\u00a0 What do Jacob, Moses, Gideon, David, Jeremiah, and Peter have in common?\u00a0 They are also-rans.\u00a0 Or flat-out failures.\u00a0 But they become God\u2019s point people.
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One scholar has suggested that the Bible\u2019s primary storyline can be summarized in seven words:\u00a0 To All By Means of the Least<\/em>.\u00a0
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Jesus is no exception.\u00a0 Here\u2019s how the prophet Isaiah looks ahead to the Messiah:\u00a0 \u201cHe was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain.\u00a0 Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held in him low esteem\u201d (53:3).\u00a0
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Yet the rejected one saves the world.\u00a0
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If you\u2019re feeling unnoticed, ungifted, and unwanted these days, remember that God can transform what others consider worthless into something beautiful.\u00a0
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Which means he can still make music out of your life.\u00a0\u00a0

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ugliness can give birth to beautiful things.\u00a0It\u2019s difficult to overstate the ugliness of the Caribbean sugar cane plantations of the 18th and 19th centuries.\u00a0 African slaves were forced to work in brutal conditions so middle-class Europeans could spoon sugar into their cups of coffee and tea.\u00a0\u00a0The slaves clung to as much of their indigenous culture as they could.\u00a0 That included… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1640,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[299,261],"class_list":["post-1639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-music","tag-slavery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1639"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1641,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1639\/revisions\/1641"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}