RE-TUNING

My piano hadn't been tuned in decades. When a local tuner opened the top to access strings and go to work, I cringed to hear how “off” it was. I've since learned that the pressure put on a piano's 218 strings is enormous—from 3400 pounds for my size piano, to the twenty tons in a concert grand.

I am not a great pianist. With small hands that barely reached an octave, I quit lessons in about sixth or seventh grade, when I began violin. I retained enough piano skills to play for worship services at a couple small churches I attended.

But “piano” is still a part of my heart. Thus I paid attention in reading about piano technology in Edith Schaeffer's Music: A Tribute to the Gift of Creativity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1986). She wrote about visiting a warehouse where pianos (built for concert use) were professionally tuned. New pianos, she related, need “breaking in” and the wood treated as the strings are tuned. Depending on their construction, high-end pianos have a brilliance that will equip them for artists playing complex classical pieces by composers like Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. We're talking the Cadillacs and Mercedes of the piano world. But they are tuned, each string, one sensitive twist of a tuning pin, at a time.

As for mine, just regular “playing.” And for me, now, hymns and the arrangements I played when attending a church that still used preludes and offertories. Alas, my meager skills mean I “gulp!” when I open the music book to a piece that has a key signature denoting lots of sharps or flats. Let's just say that low-ability keyboard musicians (I'm in that category) prefer the simpler key signatures, not A-sharp minor, which keeps your fingers touching the black keys and your brain processing “go up, go up.”

So, is there a lesson from the “black keys' of the piano—those notes known as “sharps” or “flats” and that separate beginners from aspiring artists? Maybe it's this: that spiritual maturity is like progressing in music skills. When God forces us into the finger-twisting melodies of more difficult life experiences (the “black keys”), He has a beautiful melody in mind.

And there's another lesson from this piano-tuning image. Mrs. Schaeffer put it this way in her book:

Even as pianos need constant tuning and regulating—not only when young and raw, but all through their careers of being used for brilliant concerts—so people who are being used as “instruments of righteousness”--or, in other words, living creative, fruitful lives—need constant refreshing, “tuning.” (p. 191).

I've played on out-of-tune pianos. It is a painful experience! Though never comfortable or sought, God's sessions of “tuning” me spiritually—of twisting each “just-off” behavior or faith string to His perfection—is really the only way to go.

P.S. In 1997, while a student at Multnomah Bible College in Portland, I had the privilege of hearing Mrs. Schaeffer speak. I'd previously bought and absorbed her book Hidden Art, discovering how everyday efforts could be platforms to glorify the Creator. That day she autographed it for me. She passed away in Switzerland (where she and Francis had established “L'Abri”) in 2013 at the age of 98.