{"id":5119,"date":"2025-12-19T08:40:26","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T13:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5119"},"modified":"2025-12-19T08:40:26","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T13:40:26","slug":"right-in-front-of-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/12\/19\/right-in-front-of-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Right in Front of Us"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n


\u00a0Are you ready for Christmas? During the season of Advent \u2013 which annually begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and leads up to December 25 \u2013 followers of Jesus traditionally look for ways to prepare themselves for the coming of God\u2019s own Son into the world. Throughout December we\u2019ll ponder ways that we can ready ourselves to receive Jesus, once again, into our own hearts.<\/em>

At 7:51 am on January 12, 2007 \u2013 a chilly Friday morning \u2013 a young man wearing a baseball cap stepped into Washington D.C.\u2019s L\u2019Enfant Plaza subway station.

It was the middle of the morning rush hour. He appeared to be just another busker \u2013 an amateur musician who plays for tips in public places.

This particular musician, however, was Joshua Bell \u2013 widely regarded as the world\u2019s most accomplished violinist.

His parents had suspected he might have a future in music when at age four he stretched rubber bands to his dresser drawers and played classical tunes on them, adjusting the pitch by pulling the drawers in and out.

The Washington Post<\/em>, aware of Bell\u2019s plans to offer an incognito concert, asked symphony conductor Leonard Slatkin to predict the response of the commuters who would be shuffling by.

\u201cOut of 1,000 people,\u201d he said, \u201cmy guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening.\u201d Slatkin predicted that Bell might receive something in the neighborhood of $150 in donations.

Bell set up shop alongside a subway station wall. That\u2019s him in the picture above. He took his violin \u2013 a 1713 Stradivarius valued at millions of dollars \u2013 and played six classical pieces over a period of 43 minutes. The composers included Bach, Massenet, and Schubert.

As one commentator put it, this was \u201cthe world\u2019s greatest violinist playing the world\u2019s greatest music on the world\u2019s greatest instrument.\u201d

But no crowd gathered.\u00a0<\/em>

People were in a hurry \u2013 so preoccupied with their schedules, their worries, and the next items on their lists of things to do that they hustled right past the musical chance of a lifetime.

By examining security camera footage, the Post<\/em> confirmed that 1,097 people spent at least a few minutes in the general vicinity of the \u201cconcert.\u201d Twenty-seven dropped money into Bell\u2019s violin case. Only seven actually stopped and listened to the music for a while.

The donations added up to $52.17, including a $20 bill from a single person who did a double take and realized, \u201cOh my gosh, that\u2019s Joshua Bell!\u201d\u00a0

The results of the experiment quickly went viral and were shared around the world. Many asked, \u201cHow could so many people fail to see who was right before their eyes?\u201d

But that\u2019s an old, old story \u2013 one that we find in the Bible\u2019s original accounts of the birth of Jesus. It\u2019s easy to say that if we lived in the first century, we would have immediately dropped everything and given our attention to the child in Bethlehem.\u00a0

In the moment, however, it\u2019s a great deal more challenging to know what \u2013 and who \u2013 happens to be right in front of us.

The apostle John writes: \u201c[Jesus] was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.\u00a0He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him\u201d (John 1:10-11).

Even though the fulfillment of our deepest hopes has arrived in the person of Jesus, people both then and now rarely see him for who he really is.

In the midst of this Christmas week, with its overwhelming details, how can we ever pay attention?

We must surrender to the wisdom of the words we hear every year in \u201cO, Holy Night.\u201d

Fall on your knees.<\/em>
O, hear the angel voices.<\/em>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here \u00a0Are you ready for Christmas? During the season of Advent \u2013 which annually begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and leads up to December 25 \u2013 followers of Jesus traditionally look for ways to prepare themselves for the coming of God\u2019s own Son into the world. Throughout December we\u2019ll ponder… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5120,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[119,23],"class_list":["post-5119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christmas","tag-incarnation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5119","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=5119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5121,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5119\/revisions\/5121"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}