A440 for Harmony
August 5, 2019 by Robin Steinweg
Filed under Daily Devotions, Personal Growth
By Robin J. Steinweg –
Picture eight to twelve beginning guitar students seated in a circle. I’m teaching my very first group class. They try to tune their instruments all at once. Feeding time at the zoo produces no greater cacophony.
Obviously, this doesn’t work. Their ears aren’t developed enough to tell whether they have a string on pitch or not. Mine is. So I decide to tune each guitar myself. I set my instrument to perfect A440 (the industry standard of 440 vibrations per second for the A above Middle C). I grab the guitar to my left and get it exactly like mine. The next guitar is adjusted to the one I just finished, and so on, until they’re all completed. I have the students play a G chord together. Yikes! It sounds terrible. As careful as I’ve been, they’re still not in tune with each other. What happened? I keep working at it. This one’s right on with that. Now that one’s good with the previous one. I have them play a chord again. Nasty. Finally I figure I’ll use my own guitar as the master. It works! When aligned with the one, all of them are in perfect harmony.
Isn’t it like our God to build spiritual truths into the very physics of the earth? A hundred instruments tuned to each other will not be in accord. But a hundred instruments in unison with one instrument will match up perfectly with each other.
In the same way, God’s children, hearts duplicating those around them, will be in discord. But if our hearts are attuned to the A440 of God’s Spirit, we’ll be in flawless harmony with one another.
PRAYER: Lord, You are the perfect Master I want to be in tune with. Don’t let me conform to others, but let me be transformed by the renewing of my mind—by reading Your Word and spending time in Your presence.
“Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma” (Ephesians 5:1-2 NIV).
Today’s devotional is by Robin J. Steinweg. Robin’s life might be described using the game Twister: the colored dots are all occupied, limbs intertwine (hopefully not to the point of tangling), and you never know which dot the arrow will point to next, but it sure is fun getting there!
Robin
How easily the truth makes sense when you put it in a parable as the Master would! Well said. We need to tune our lives to the one that made us and loves us no matter what the others do or say. Thanks.
Thank you, Lisa,
Our lives ARE like stories, aren’t they?
I love this piece, Robin. The tuning seems like it should work, tuning one student to another, but it doesn’t. Thank you for the illustration and the reminder of Ephesians 5. We’re to be imitators of God, not each other.
Lori,
Thanks for mentioning Eph. 5! There’s the plumbline–I mean A440!