There was once a man named Frank and he was so engrossed with the life of Mozart that he studied all the pieces that Mozart played as well as how he composed music and hints and stories of how Mozart played the piano – and how he learned other pieces of music.
Frank started to practice playing like Mozart in hopes of becoming more like him. As he was doing this, he noticed that there were other students that also tried to do the same.
In this journey of becoming like Mozart, Frank started to look and listen to how the other students were playing. Most of them didn’t get even one Mozart piece correctly.
Then Frank started to criticize and complain about their piano skills. Frank was so focused in trying to make them realize how badly they were playing that weeks and months and even years have passed that this is all he would do.
Needless to say that Frank left that community because of his frustration and decided he can learn playing like Mozart on his own.
Meanwhile the community of players became better and better because they would encourage each other and build each other up. It came to a point that they were playing almost as well as Mozart could!
However Frank couldn’t get over the fact that there were people who couldn’t play Mozart as well as he’d hoped that he gave up playing altogether.
Sometimes we are like Frank. We look at other people and how they are trying to be more like Jesus.
We get frustrated because the Christian life has ups and downs, temptations, challenges and struggles. We make mistakes and sometimes those mistakes are horrible and sometimes they become very public.
But we shouldn’t get too discouraged or too fixated with other Christians. They are trying to be like Jesus but it takes years, maybe even decades – of walking with our God – to be able to be a lot like Jesus!
Why do we have people who looks so intently at other Christians? At other players? The only thing that matters in the end is HOW WE play our own music. Not how other people play.
We get so good in finding the wrong notes in how other people play that we ourselves forgot how to play – and when we begin to try, we become so out of tune.
Because we forgot that we need to study the master, not the other players.
Focus on the Master so you become more like Him.