"Tune my heart to sing thy grace."

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.

 Originally Posted 09/09/2013