The Cellist in the Ruins

In May 1992, a mortar shell struck a bread line in Sarajevo, killing twenty-two people who had simply stepped outside to feed their families. The city was under siege, buildings shattered, snipers on the rooftops. Most people hid.

But Vedran Smailovic, a cellist with the Sarajevo Opera, put on his formal black concert suit, carried his cello to the crater where the shell had landed, and began to play. He performed Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor — one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces ever written — for twenty-two consecutive days, one day for each person killed. Bullets cracked overhead. Rubble surrounded him. And still he played.

When reporters asked him why, Smailovic didn't offer a grand explanation. He simply said he played because that was what he could do. In the middle of destruction, he offered the one gift he had been given.

The Almighty doesn't always call us to do something extraordinary. He calls us to do our thing — the specific thing He shaped us for — even when the world around us is falling apart. Jeremiah 29:11 reminds us that God's plans for us are plans with a purpose. Not someone else's purpose. Ours.

You may not play the cello. But you have something the world needs — a skill, a word, a presence — and the place where you are standing right now is exactly where God asks you to use it.