Encouragement

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Every now and then, the piano at the church where I work needs tuned. I always laugh when the gentleman comes to do this job. It is always on a day when I am “not in the mood” to listen to one note being played 407 times before he moves to the next note, which seems to get played 704 times..etc. It makes me realize just how many keys there actually are on a piano.

The piano man came on a hard day for me. There were many things going on that are stressful. I knew I would grow and learn from them, but nonetheless, they are things I wished I could avoid. When he started ping-ping-pinging on the keyboard, my inside-stress-meter briefly hit alarm overload mode. ARRRGGG NOT TODAY! But then the Lord took over from there.

He seemed to ask, “What day would I really want to listen to this serenade?” “Never!” would have been my answer, even though I know it must be done for the proper functioning of the instrument.

Just like the tuner works incessantly on one key to get it in its proper place, to bring it in alignment with his will, the Lord is gracious to work incessantly to refine and retune me. Do I always like the days and times these lessons occur? Nope, but it is necessary to the proper functioning of my spirit. If I could pick what day this week I would I re-schedule them for, it would never happen. I would never get around to saying, “I really need some stress today, I feel like learning. Okay, Lord, bring it on! I am fortified and ready.”

It was interesting to see the look of concentration on the piano man’s face. I just sat back and watched him for a few minutes. He doesn’t give up or quit until it is right. He is relentless and diligent. Each ping is important to him. He cares about each of those keys. Each ping must be right. Sooner or later, the key conforms to his wishes, and he moves on to the next one. He seems to enjoy it. The pings that all sound alike to me, talk to him in a different way.

I can just visualize the Lord doing His “ping-ping-pinging” on my spirit with a similar look of concentration. The difference between me and a key, though, is that I have more options. I don’t just get perfect before the appointment is done. What He fixes today, I might uproot tomorrow in my humanness, causing Him to start all over again. I can’t imagine the level of patience and love mixed in with His concentration. And just like the each ping is so important to the piano man, each of my pings are important to the Lord. I know He will keep working on me incessantly, relentlessly forever because he cares for me. That makes the trials of today in some ways happy. I wonder, “What am I to learn?” Rather than, “How can I best whine about this situation?” He is just tuning me to be a better instrument for Him.

When the tuner finished his monotonous tuning drills, he played a real song. It was beautiful. To think all those obnoxious pings could come together to make such a melody was pretty inspiring. I hope one day that we will be so well tuned that our final products can make something wonderful for the Lord. Until then, I guess we’ll just keep ping-pinging along.

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