Precious and Few
I think God must have specially wired our brains for music. We store a wealth of music in our heads and you never know when a song from the past will pop out of your mental storage bank and into your consciousness. I was in the kitchen at our daughter’s house yesterday when the first six words of a rock song, popular when I was 19 years old, came back to me: “Precious and few are the moments . . . .” I went to Ray in the living room and my precious encyclopedia/dictionary/Bible concordance/rock music lyric remembering husband supplied the rest of the line: “Precious and few are the moments we two can share.”
In this romantic painting from 1870, artist John George Brown depicted a courting couple enjoying a precious few moments for two by having a music lesson.
The Music Lesson by John George Brown, 1870
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
With apologies to lyricist Walter D. Nims who wrote the song, I don’t think that the rest of the lyrics measure up to the truth and beauty in his song’s first line. That line is true: precious and few are the moments we people can share with our husbands or wives and with our children, our parents, our siblings, our friends, our brothers and sisters in Christ, and those other folks God created in His image and sends into our lives. Therefore, we should treat those moments as the precious gifts they are because those husbands, wives, children, parents, siblings, friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, and other folks are precious.
Spending time with precious people takes one conscious and purposeful decision after another. Sometimes it takes laying aside our own personal interests to honor the interests of others. Homeschooling is a precious way to do that.
Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit,
but with humility of mind regard one another
as more important than yourselves;
do not merely look out for your own personal interests,
but also for the interests of others.
Philippians 2:3-4