I used to think music was made entirely of sound. Then I began paying attention to the rests.

I compose music. Much of composing involves deciding what should be heard—which notes belong in the melody, which chords should support them and what rhythm will carry the piece forward.

But a composer must also decide when nothing should be heard.

A rest is not an empty place where the composer ran out of ideas. It is written deliberately. It has a precise beginning and duration, and the musician must perform it as carefully as any note.

Enter too early and the right note becomes wrong. Wait too long and the music loses its intended movement.

Silence, it turns out, is not the absence of music.

It is part of the composition.

That can be difficult for a musician. When everyone around you is playing, doing nothing does not feel particularly musical. Your fingers are ready. Your eyes continue moving across the page. Everything in you anticipates the moment when you will contribute again.

But your assignment, for now, is to wait—and to remain attentive while doing it.

The temptation to fill an empty measure is not limited to musicians.

We live in a culture that rewards visible activity, quick answers and immediate reactions. When conversation grows quiet, we reach for words. When the house becomes still, we introduce noise. When prayer receives no immediate answer, we wonder whether God is listening.

When life stops moving at the tempo we prefer, we assume something has gone wrong.

So we rush to fill the measure.

I have done this more often than I care to admit. I have spoken when listening would have been more helpful. I have acted when patience would have been wiser. I have attempted to manufacture progress because waiting made me feel as though I was contributing nothing.

A composer can continue adding notes until every available space has been occupied. More melody. More harmony. More movement. Yet there comes a point when adding something else does not make the music richer.

It only makes it crowded.

Sometimes the most important decision a composer makes is not what to add, but what to remove.

Life can become crowded in the same way. We fill our schedules, conversations and thoughts until there is no room to hear anything beyond the noise we have created. We become so accustomed to activity that rest begins to feel irresponsible.

But rest was present from the beginning.

After six days of creation, God rested. Not because He was exhausted or had run out of ideas. His rest completed the rhythm of creation.

Jesus also withdrew from crowds and activity to spend time alone. Silence and solitude were not interruptions of His purpose. They were part of it.

Rest is not necessarily a reward for finishing everything. If that were the requirement, few of us would ever qualify.

Rest can be an act of trust. It acknowledges that the world continues turning when we stop pushing it. It reminds us that our worth is not measured entirely by our output and that God does not depend upon our constant activity to accomplish His purposes.

Some rests are chosen. Others arrive without invitation.

An opportunity disappears. A relationship changes. An expected answer does not come. A door closes, and we find ourselves standing in a measure we did not write and would prefer not to perform.

We can mistake those seasons for abandonment.

But perhaps we have simply reached a rest.

That does not make waiting painless or passive. A musician counting several empty measures must continue following the music. The performer listens, counts and prepares for the next entrance.

There is a difference between resting and quitting.

Quitting abandons the composition. Resting remains attentive to it.

Perhaps your work feels unproductive, your prayers seem unanswered or the direction that once felt clear has become uncertain. You may be tempted to play something—anything—just to break the silence.

But an early note can disturb what is being created.

There are moments when faithfulness sounds like action. There are others when faithfulness sounds like silence.

The wisdom is knowing which measure we are in.

Music requires both sound and silence. Life does too. The notes allow us to express what is within us. The rests give us room to listen for what comes next.

If life seems unusually quiet right now, don’t assume the song is over.

The silence may be part of the music.

This morning, I came across some information about my parents that surprised me.

I mentioned it to Selena several times throughout the day. I also checked with my sister to see whether she knew anything about it. She didn’t provide the immediate explanation I was looking for, so the information remained one of those loose threads the mind keeps tugging when it should be occupied with something else.

On Sunday evenings, I have a Zoom call with my children. We began the practice during COVID, when isolation forced families to find new ways of occupying the same room. The restrictions eventually lifted, but our weekly gathering remained.

Tonight, I mentioned what I had discovered to my boys.

One thing led to another, and Selena produced a document I had received some time ago but never read. It was a genealogy written by my father.

I scanned the document, sent copies to my children and began reading.

My father spent seventy-four pages remembering people he had never met.

He traced names through courthouse records, cemetery inscriptions, marriage certificates, land transactions and family stories. He followed generations across states and, when the evidence permitted, across oceans. He constructed an elaborate numbering system in which every digit and letter identified another person’s place on the Burgin family tree.

Some of the people recorded there had been dead for centuries. Yet he searched for their birthplaces, spouses, children, migrations and final resting places. He tried to distinguish documented history from family tradition and left spaces where information had escaped him.

On a page titled “Why Study Genealogy?” he asked:

“Do you want your grandchildren to know who you are? Of course you do, but we forget so easily.”

That sentence may explain the entire project.

My father understood that forgetting happens quietly. A name disappears from conversation. A photograph loses its identification. A story is remembered by one generation, partially repeated by the next and buried with the generation after that.

He was attempting a rescue operation.

The manuscript was eventually typed from his original notes by a coworker named Ginny. He took it to a family reunion, gathered additional information and intended to produce an updated version.

He died before finishing it.

What remained was a working history—imperfect, speculative in places and occasionally contradicted by better evidence. Yet it is still a remarkable record of his curiosity, persistence and desire to preserve something that might otherwise disappear.

But as I moved through the pages, I encountered something I did not expect.

The closer the genealogy came to my father, the thinner and less accurate it became.

The distant branches received names, dates, marriages, children and stories. When the record reached his own family, the information was incomplete or wrong.

The inaccuracies were not hidden among distant branches of the family tree.

My birthday is wrong. My son Jared’s birthday is wrong. My sister’s husband is represented by a blank space before his last name.

These were not ancestors separated from my father by centuries. They were his children, his son-in-law and his grandson. Their information did not need to be excavated from a courthouse basement or deciphered from a weathered headstone.

It only needed to be known.

That is where my surprise began turning into hurt.

Then I reached the bottom of one page and turned to the next.

My father had written that he made several mistakes in his life. The sentence continued across the page break:

“Two of them was getting married and the other one was when his children were growing up. He says, ‘I lost it, but life will go on.’”

Immediately beneath those words appeared the heading:

“Children by George and Kay.”

Then he began listing his children.

I am one of those children.

I do not know precisely what my father meant. I don’t know what he believed he had lost or whether those words adequately expressed what he intended to say.

I only know what it felt like to read them.

The man who carefully recovered the names of distant relatives from obscurity left his own children standing beneath a sentence about regret and loss.

That hurt.

The temptation is to make the manuscript testify against him—to treat every omission as a verdict, every mistake as proof of indifference and that painful sentence as the final explanation of our relationship.

But that would require me to claim knowledge I do not possess.

The manuscript demonstrates that my father cared about family. What remains uncertain is what the word “family” meant to him.

Perhaps he understood family primarily as lineage: a shared name moving through history, connecting one generation to another. Family, in that sense, is ancestry, migration, continuity and inheritance.

But lineage is not the same thing as relationship.

A family tree can tell us who belonged to whom. It cannot tell us whether they were known, heard, encouraged or loved well.

Genealogy is orderly. Living families rarely are.

The dead remain where the records place them. They make no new decisions, raise no objections and offer no competing memories. Their names can be arranged into generations, and the empty spaces between dates can sometimes be filled with an appealing story.

The living are more complicated.

They change. They struggle. They disappoint us and are sometimes disappointed by us. They remember events differently. They need things from us that cannot be satisfied by adding another name to a page.

Perhaps it is possible to love the idea of family while struggling with the demands of relationship.

That possibility would be easy to assign entirely to my father. It would also allow me to avoid a more uncomfortable question:

Do I know the people closest to me as carefully as I know the things that interest me?

I may know the history of a place but not the disappointment one of my children is carrying. I may remember the accomplishments of someone who died a century ago while overlooking the quiet courage of the person sitting across from me. I may preserve photographs, dates and stories for future generations while failing to be fully present with the generation sharing my life today.

Records are important. Stories matter. I am grateful my father cared enough to gather both.

But preserving a family requires more than remembering its past. It requires paying attention to its present.

The most important family history is still being written around our tables, during telephone calls and, sometimes, among a collection of faces arranged across a computer screen every Sunday night.

It is written when we ask another question and remain long enough to hear the answer. It is written when we remember what someone is facing, acknowledge where we have been wrong and choose relationship over the comfort of our own version of events.

My father feared that we forget too easily.

He was right.

But forgetting is not limited to names disappearing from old records. We can also forget to notice the people standing directly in front of us.

His manuscript preserved hundreds of names. It also left a few unexpected spaces, several incorrect details and one sentence I wish I had never needed to read.

I cannot fill those spaces for him, rewrite his words or know with certainty what he intended.

I can, however, decide what those words will produce in me.

I want to honor the people who came before me by remembering their names and preserving their stories. But I also want to honor the people beside me by knowing them accurately, listening to them carefully and loving them while there is still time to do so.

Someday, my name may occupy a line in someone else’s family history.

Until then, I intend to keep showing up on Sunday nights.

I want my children to know that their place in my life is not beneath a sentence about regret. Their names are not merely branches in a genealogy or details to be recorded accurately.

They are among the best parts of my story.

And I want to make certain that the names closest to mine are never the people I know the least.

Like most iPhone users, I have a love/hate relationship with Siri.  The guidance offered by her electronic vocal chords generally gnaws on my nerves while leaving me wondering why I subject my life’s traverse to a programmer in Northern California.

You’re familiar with the procedure:  Push and hold the “home” button and wait for her to acknowledge your summons…

“Beep, beep.”

“Take me to the nearest sign shop.”

“Did you say, ‘wine shop’”?

“No.  Take me to the nearest sign shop.”

After selecting the closest sign maker from her offerings, I obediently followed the cues to a site on Front Street.

We needed a sign to affix to the outside of our new church building in Butte, Montana.  A sign is important because it tells the public who you are and sets some expectation about what people can find inside.

Without much misdirection I arrived outside a building bearing 804 as the only other confirmation I had reached my destination.  Quickly scanning the building, I noticed a blinking “Open” sign in the window.  I exited my vehicle and after approaching the door, reached for the handle and pulled.  Being bested by a magnet in the top left corner sent my eyes looking for a solution.  “Push the button for service” was posted just above a metal box to the left of the door.  So, wanting service, I pushed the button.

“Yeah.”

“Can I come in?”

The faint hum of electricity granted me entrance into the building.

I immediately stood in a hallway.  Looking both directions, each way provided 20 feet of carpet leading to the next expanse.  A taller person might have missed the little red arrow affixed to the wall at knee level pointing would be adventurers to the left.

The customer at the service counter had long gray hair.  Not the gray you get for $8 at the local beauty college but the gray that absorbs light; dull, dingy – almost sepia like.  He was leaning in such a way that his center of gravity jumped through the service window to an employee with gauges the size of golf balls.  The millennial accessorized his mutilated ears with ingots thrust through his eye brows and lower lip.  He wore a black knitted cap with white paint screened deep into its fibers in the shape of a skull.  The gray-haired man was filling out what looked like a job application.

“Business is booming in Butte” I thought trying to find an explanation for why I was standing four deep in a line to order a sign.

Abstract art hung on the walls of the large, brightly lit room.  Scattered magazines lay on top of the forty-two inch round table at my rear.  One magazine in particular – you know, one of those oversized ones?  The cover image was a grunge guy leaning against a wall crossing his arms against his midriff.  Entertaining some way he paid for all that ink, I wondered how many banks owned his house.  I couldn’t help but notice the title at the top of the half-inch stack of high gloss paper all glued together that read, “Hanabis”.

“Ok, all I need now is your driver’s license.”

I watched as the man dipped into his back pocket to retrieve his billfold and hand over his identity.

As if my suspicion wasn’t already redlined, all the components of this experience: the door, the music, the old guy, the millennial, the abstract art, the over-sized magazine – it all came into focus when, in one rehearsed transaction, the younger handed the older…a green card.

“I’m in a marijuana shop…” , the synapses of my brain crashed together.

I caught eyes with the satiated gray-haired man as he silently hobbled past me.   Before the next customer could begin her personal iteration of a jackpot I asked, “Hey, is this a sign shop?”

“No, we’re medical marijuana.”

“Where’s the sign shop?”

“Next door.”

“Next door” was only a room full of unlabeled boxes and metal shelving.  Acting on the last remaining option, I exited the building.

One hundred feet away was a descending ramp leading to a rickety old door left open about two inches.  Peering inside took me to a place I remembered seeing on the 27 inch color TV in our living room when I was a kid watching Pinocchio.  The scene was dark and dusty.  The rays of luminance from the windows cast shadows on the concrete floor revealing the corkscrew shaves of wood – the evidence of effort from the man standing at the table in the center of the room.

A real life Geppetto, the sign maker wielded a wooden mallet and a chisel.

“Tick.”   “Tick.”   “Tick.”  Each instance sending more material to the cold floor.

The answer seemed obvious, but I was compelled to ask,  “Is this a sign shop?”

I entered the shop introducing myself with a smile and a handshake.  His strong, leathery hand was the antithesis of his face and voice.  We laughed together as I told him about my trip to the marijuana shop.  He indicated I wasn’t the first.

“You know why, John?  You’re the sign guy without a sign.  Your business isn’t properly marked.  Nothing outside promises I’ll get what I’m looking for – a sign.”

Stop and think about that for a minute.  Isn’t a sign guy without a sign very similar to a Christian without the outward evidence of an inward Christ?

Did you know you’re being watched?  Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people are watching you and me looking for some external evidence of the goodness we so commonly profess.  But, what are people seeing? Well, that’s for you to control.  And, that’s the lesson learned from the sign guy who doesn’t have a sign.

PS.  I think I figured out what “Hanabis” is.  It must be the combination of hemp and canabis – Hanabis.