The Master Musician

I think it was the sudden change in weather that has my piano all messed up. It went from a perfectly good instrument to something that makes me wince. So last night, when I was playing it before church, I almost stopped playing. I kept thinking the song is nice, and the melody is nice, and this could be pretty music…but it’s not.

And that’s when I began wondering how often God says the same thing about me. I think most people have been in the position where they were doing something that could easily glorify God and yet they did it with a bad attitude. Maybe the group was doing something different from what they enjoyed, or maybe you knew the family gathering wouldn’t be pleasant so instead of making the best of it that you could, you went with a bad attitude. God could have used it, and made it something beautiful, but you were out of tune.

Fortunately, my piano tuner doesn’t mind explaining things as he goes along, so I’ve learned a lot about piano tuning. Every single note on my piano has three separate strings that have to be tuned to just the right pitch for the one key to make the correct tone. Then he has to make sure that he’s got all the correct tones for all the correct keys so that when you blend two, three, or four different keys together, that all the tones are just right so that together they make the appropriate tone as well. It takes a lot of work to be in tune. And interestingly enough, the special “detail” notes (the high notes) tend to fall out of pitch faster he said.

So you might be able to play the piano and not notice the notes that are out of tune, but if you want to add the high pitch notes to make your song special, that’s when you’ll notice something is out of kilter. But, he said, you can’t just have someone come in and tune those high notes because that could throw the rest of the notes off tune with those notes.

It’s complicated to tell you how I can apply this to my own life, just because there are so very many ways I could apply this. I want my life to be in tune. I want the melody that the Master Musician plays in my life to be pleasant to His ears. With each note in harmony with all three strings, in a perfect tune that only His ears will detect.

That still left me playing a discordant sound Wednesday night and tempted to stop playing. And when I was tempted to stop playing I realized all the times that my life has been discordant to God. And I found myself praying with all my heart that God would never stop playing in my life, even though I often sound bad. And bad notes sound even worse to a masters ear.

I want to take you back to the hopeless feeling I mentioned in yesterdays post, because I can think of no better way to describe it than this example. My piano is hopeless. It’s only hope is that someone will come along and play it, and that someone will come along and tune it. It can’t fix itself, it can’t play itself. It can give joy to others, but only at someone or Someone elses hands.

And so I played, and I kept on playing until the very moment I had to stop. May God do the same for me.