I have been playing piano for 26 years now. That always baffles me when I say it because I’m 29. That also means that I’ve played in a few different places. For any of you who play piano, you know that unlike a guitar that you can carry with you wherever you go, you’re kinda subject to whatever a church has. That means that sometimes you can go to a church and see some pretty rough stuff. I remember one time in particular that my dad was preaching at a church on the North Side (That’s north St. Louis City for those that don’t know or aren’t from here) and as was dad’s custom, he asked me to come up and play a song before he started preaching. Now I was only about 12 or 13, so nothing special by any means. However, when I sat down to play whatever song he had asked me to play (probably Amazing Grace, the standard ‘before the sermon’ song), I noticed a couple things. First off, some of the keys weren’t even ivory anymore. The tops were gone! That’s okay as long as they play though. But this piano was all kinds of jacked up. The middle C didn’t work (BUMMER!) and The D above the C above middle C (that was a lot, but musicians know what I’m talking about. I guess I could have put D4). The song I was playing was in G and that means that my D was completely NOT there. I totally remember singing that D out loud when I got to it so it wouldn’t be lost in the music. But that was what I was given and so I played that piano to the best of my ability, which again wasn’t the best.

Now, I thought about taking the simple road and going into how God uses us as His broken instruments and uses us for His glory all the time, but I think that was something that EVERYONE could see coming. So I’ve decided to take a different approach. My question is this. Why is it that when things are working well we can say things like this, but when we are in the midst of trials we seem to forget that God loves us and continues to work in and through us? I have been dealing with a lot of struggles in my life over the past few days and I’ve felt useless. However, I’m the same one who is constantly trying to help others realize that God loves them no matter what. Sometimes it feels hypocritical to say when sometimes I find difficulty in believing it myself.

I think what I and we have to realize is that we are ALWAYS broken instruments. Surely, there are times that we are more broken than others, but at the end of the day, we’re still broken because we’re still flawed. At our best we still have a major defect. The difference between us and that piano that I played over 16 years ago was the one making up the difference. I know that I did the best I could with that old upright Hamilton, and I know for sure I could have worked around it even better today. But even now, there is only so much I can do in my own power. My life is way more jacked up than that piano sometimes and God uses this life of mine and makes it look so much better because He is filling in the gaps.

So what brought on this whole thought for me? Well simply enough, I got to lead worship in chapel at Missouri Baptist yesterday and the drool producing Yamaha that is in the auditorium. That piano is ALWAYS right and I love it. I started thinking about all the bad pianos I’ve played and the rest is written up there. Have you ever played an instrument that was so bad that you didn’t know what to do with it? Has anyone given you their guitar to play and when you started you felt like it had never been tuned before? Share with me your bad instrument stories.

Tags: God, Instruments, music