“And now behold, I say unto you, my brethren, if ye have experienced a change of heart, and if ye have felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I would ask, can ye feel so now?” (Alma 5:26). When we consider the beauty and majesty of our Heavenly Father’s Plan of Salvation and His great and marvelous work, His precise timing, His unifying of complex and disparate parts into one great whole, what else could we compare this to besides a song? The music of this song is created by the rhythm of celestial bodies in the heavens orbiting precisely in their spheres, by the complex harmony of every living creature on earth, by choirs of angels singing praises unto God, and yes, even by us. We each have our part to sing in the great Song of Redeeming Love. It is up to us to decide if we will first be still and listen to the music and feel it in our souls and strive to add to its beauty harmoniously with our own contributions, or if we will rather in our arrogance assume that we ought to be able to play a different, superior melody opposed to the theme our Father in Heaven has devised, or out of a lack of faith and bitterness we assume that such music is beyond us even to attempt and so we remain silent and the song’s glory is diminished by our absence, or else we pay no attention at all and just play whatever idle notes pass through our mind, adding notes that blend into the greater harmony only randomly. The Lord has told us that His thoughts are higher than our thoughts, His ways are higher than our ways, and to extend it one step further, His notes are higher than our notes. If our voices are squarely in the tenor range, we can’t hope to reach the heights of a soprano at the top of her range, but that does not mean that a tenor and a soprano can’t sing together in harmony and create beautiful songs together. We don’t have to match our Heavenly Father’s range or pitch to still sing in harmony with Him. We may be afraid to sing the song of redeeming love because we are afraid that our voices can’t possibly measure up to all of the other voices that are singing, least of all the voices of our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. But we don’t have to sing a solo. We are part of a choir. We will only stand out insofar as we deviate from themes of the music. Singing out of sync or out of tune with the great music all around us does not feel good, just as sinning and rebelling against our covenants does not feel good. But the more we sing and listen and listen and sing, we will get swept up in the music, we will develop a greater ear for when we are singing off-key or off-tempo, we will develop a clearer voice and a more refined sense of timing so that we can keep up with the music, and we will be swallowed up in the Redeeming Love of our Savior Jesus Christ and our Heavenly Father.
