The Musician and His Instrument

Constant tuning makes great melody...

As a teenager, I tried for a few years to learn the violin. I was never any good at it. I felt very inadequate and wasn’t able to tune my own strings. There are four individual strings on a violin: G, D, A, and E.  My teacher could tune my violin because the music flowed in him. He would strike one sting with his fingers and listened not to the sound created but the vibration of the string. From the vibration he would know if he needed to adjust the pitch higher or lower and know when it’s in tune. He would use the first string as a foundation and tune the other three successively. He would tune my violin at the beginning of each lesson, and after a half-hour of playing, he would do it again. My poor violin only played in tune once a week when my teacher tuned it.

 A life of prayer allows us to make beautiful music as we begin to be more Christ-like. Unlike the strings on a violin which doesn’t have a choice as to who tunes it, we can ask our Musician to tune us and be open for tuning. In order for our souls to vibrate in perfect pitch, we need the Musician to tune our strings. We need His expert hands to stretch us. He knows the unique vibration of our souls because He made us and also the music. The stretching in the tuning process is the awareness of ourselves, our sins and temptations. Music will flow when we are tuned to His satisfaction.

When I first felt God stretch the music string of my soul, the sensation was new and uncomfortable. The pain made me want to recoil into my prior state of looseness. The spiritual tuning transcended to an actual physical pain in my heart. I asked God to stop the stretching. I was faced with two choices: resist the tuning and return to my prior state of looseness or surrender to the painful stretching to play in tune. Then, something started to change. I could feel the vibration and knew that I was slowly beginning to play in tune. The vibration started to ignite and spread in my soul. The more I was stretched, the more I could hear the vibration on my strings matching His pitch. I gave in to the stretching when I finally heard God’s sweet music in my soul. In the midst of the stretching and the pain, the sweet music and it’s vibration, there is comfort. I now feel the joy of producing His music.

Our role as Christians is to play the beautiful music which God designed us to make. The stretching is God’s work in our souls to prepare us to make the His music. Surrender to the tuning, and God’s melody will flow from us. Recoil to our prior looseness, and we will play out of tune, without producing a coherent melody.

Let Him tune you, play the notes He designed you to play and submit yourself to his retuning. Together we can play the beautiful melody God created us to make. May our music be life-giving to those that hear it.

Image: Edmund Charles Tarbell, Girl With Violin, 1890