A Flat E

Last week we had our piano tuned.  It really needed it too.  It had gone a year since its last tuning and had travelled 530 miles in the back of a moving truck.  I suppose it's not surprising that at times you couldn't tell for sure if you were playing Fur Elise or the theme from Phantom of the Opera.

OK.  It wasn't quite that bad, but it definitely needed tuning.

So, in the course of human events, we contacted a piano tuner who came and opened the back of the piano.  He turned various little screws attached to the strings and eventually finished his work and called it good.  On closing the back of our Baldwin, he assembled his tools and drove on to tune another piano in need.

All was well.  At least it was well until our children began to practice their pieces that evening at which point we discovered that the high 'E' an octave above Middle C was seriously flat.  It wasn't flat enough to be an E flat, but it was off enough that the sound was quite jarring.

All the other notes were perfect, but it is amazing how many songs have an E in them.

Of course, all was not lost.  A quick call to the tuner and a day or two later even that E was back in tune.

As I played a few pieces before the final tuning was complete, I was struck by how much of a difference having a single note off makes.  It isn't enough that you can't recognize pieces, but it is enough that you can tell something is wrong.

It strikes me that this is what having a life without Jesus is like.  It may feel almost perfect in every respect and still there is something that rings untrue, a chord which falls flat.

Humans hear the discordance, but instead of fixing the note that is absent, they try to tune all of the other notes to try to make the discordant note sound OK.  People hide the flat 'E' amongst a bunch of other flat notes and everything is still just not right.

In the end there is only one thing that can fix a life that is out of tune -- Jesus presence within it.  As the notes come into tune, finally, the melody of life will become beautiful.