Doing and hearing and knowing and being.

You know, I think everyone in my family knows more about music than I do. My mom was the one who started my education on it by adding piano to our home school regime, but at 7 or 8 yrs old I'm pretty sure I wasn't listening well enough for her to have taught me everything she knows. After a series of music teachers none of us liked (my brother was learning also), my brother was the one who ultimately taught me the main trick that entirely changed how I play.

To this day, I tend to sit, smiling and nodding, while my brother and dad talk music. Or worse yet, ask me about music.

And yet, I'm the only one in my family who would call themselves a musician.

I've played, and I've played and I've played and I've played, until one day it became something I was. I'm at home at the piano. I hear the music in my head, and looking at the keys playing the song in my mind, I don't even hit the notes to know that I'm playing the right keys.

Yet often a song comes along and I'll listen to it, and when I sit down to try it myself I find that I just can't seem to duplicate the sound. I need notes, (which I can at least read) and once I have read how it's done, with practice I'm able to duplicate it.

All of this came to my mind this morning as I thought about being a doer of the word, and not a hearer only. Sometimes we're full of a lot of knowledge, and maybe we do Gods will, but we haven't done it enough and made it into such a vital part of our lives that we have transformed from 'someone who does' to 'a doer'. There's a big difference in those two things and I think the most obvious of which is that a 'doer' will walk into almost any situation in the realm of their 'doing'. If you ask me to play before a crowd of a thousand people, as a musician, I would do it. Whereas, "someone who plays" would generally laugh off the question itself.

To me though, the best part is that I'm not a great musician. I flub up all the time, and generally can't play outside of my own style of playing, and only with immediate practice can I play in the key of A#. Those facts, even by Mr. Websters definition don't keep me from being a musician. That makes me believe that I don't have to be an exceptional doer either. I just have to keep doing and doing and doing and doing, until I become a doer. Until the act of doing is so common for me that regardless of the circumstances, I'm not only willing, but confident that I will be able to 'do' upon request.

I guess, knowing how much I play and how little I know about music; and how much others know about music and how little they play, it easily translates to spiritual things in that the doers aren't always the knowers, and the knowers aren't always doers.