Hymn: “Come, Thou Fount of Ev’ry Blessing” – Robert Robinson
(1735-1790)
Tunes: NETTLETON, WARRENTON
I had an aunt in Tennessee who played a great “country piano”.
She could add all those runs and flourishes that make the Saturday-night-singing
southern style work so well. I’m not sure she could read a note of written
music, but she could make any familiar gospel song come to life.
In an un-heated, non-air conditioned room in her farm house
she played the heck out of that piano for a while most every day, but she never
had the piano tuned. Over the years, the tuning got so bad, there was no longer
an identifiable pitch to any key; there were 88 out-of-tune notes on her piano.
Little by little, she didn’t even notice. To the rest of us, her playing was a
blurred smear of noise; as far as she was concerned, she still heard the
melodies and harmonies. It’s sort of like that hackneyed illustration of the
frog in the boiling water pot – as the tuning went away, my aunt lost all her
sense of musical hearing.
I vividly remember being at her house on a Christmas Eve
when she began to play what I thought must have been a carol. Turning to me she
said, “Go ahead. Sing, Ronald George!” I had no earthly idea what she was
playing; I knew the meter was grouped in two’s, but beyond that, I recognized
nothing! My reply, “I don’t think I know that one,” was to no avail. “Everybody
knows, ‘Joy to the World’,” she said. So I broke into an atonal singing of the
carol as whole-heartedly – and with as little internal laughter – as I could!
Have you ever been in a room when someone was tuning a
piano? It is not an easy process to endure. Tuners are highly-skilled and trained
in what is becoming a lost art, and how THEY stand it, I’ll never know. But it
is something that just has to be done if we are to hear the notes with any
clarity.
Sometimes, my heart gets out of tune. Like my Baldwin, I
need a good tuning; like my Toyota, I need a tune-up. That’s when my
hymn-filled brain turns to this hymn-line, and I ask God to tune my heart so I
can better express his gracious self.
Like piano-tuning, it may not be an easy process to endure,
but it is something that must be done occasionally if those around me are to
hear the gospel lived out through me.
Things to do today: call a piano technician, schedule a
mechanic, get my life back in tune.
No comments:
Post a Comment
You are welcome to comment on any of the posts. They are sent to ME directly. Thanks for any feedback you would like to make.