The Power of Our Words

I stood at the door of the second-grade classroom and called my next piano student. I called again. Where was she in that mass of students?

Soon I saw a girl hurrying toward me, not the student I needed, just one who wanted to say hi. She threw her arms around me and said, “You look pretty today.”

Little did she know that I had barely finished cleaning the bathroom on time to get to work. I had exchanged my black knit pants for a skirt, put in earrings, and rushed out the door. No, none of this mattered to the child who saw me as pretty and made my day.

May I be as wise with my words as she is.

The Purpose of a Dog and the Purpose of Me

My knowledge of movies and pop culture is laughable due to a bad habit of burying myself in music that is three hundred years old. My students occasionally try to pull me back into the twenty-first century, like this week when they told me about the soon-to-be-released movie, A Dog’s Purpose.

I asked one student, “What is the purpose of a dog?” and I was pleased with her articulate answer, but then I followed up with, “What do you think our purpose is?”

“That’s a tough question,” she replied.

How do I respond to that? Is there anything more important than knowing our purpose in life? Vince Vitale put it well when he compared life to an athletic competition: “Imagine being thrown into a game without knowing when it started, when it will finish, what the objective of the game is, or what the rules are.”

But how could I approach this topic without getting religious? Am I here by accident with no purpose at all? Is there a God who created me? If so, who is He, and why did He make me?

None of these questions fit the purpose of a violin lesson so I steered the conversation back to music theory and intonation, but the interchange stuck with me.

These topics might not be appropriate for casual conversation with a violin student, but they are always appropriate within my friendships. If I were thrown into a basketball game with no idea of the rules or what to do with the ball, I would expect my friends to tell me those important details. Shouldn’t we be just as open with each other when searching for the right direction of our lives?

Hiding from the Sun

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The sun’s rays bounced off the lake and blinded my eyes. Reading by the lake is fun when I can see something, but my eyes are particularly sensitive to light right now. The glare on the water was not enjoyable, and I found myself praying for clouds the next morning.

Much to my family’s delight, that prayer went unanswered, so I strolled through the resort grounds looking for a bench in the shade, but even the swing that was perfectly placed under a tree could not protect me from the reflection on the lake. Puzzling over this momentarily, I walked back to where two patio chairs were stacked by a fire pit. I moved one behind the trunk of a large tree and settled into my little hiding spot.

Wisps of clouds decorated the horizon and pine needles sparkled in the sun. Basking in the glory of this perfect morning, I contemplated a quote by C.S. Lewis, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the  sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

I believe in God not because I see Him but because He makes sense of everything I see and feel: the order in the universe, the origin of life, the moral code in my heart, and my quest for the meaning behind it all.

But my hiding place behind that tree helped me see a second meaning in Lewis’s comment. He captured how I worship God. Many days I do not see God’s direct glory. I cannot spend eight hours a day in church, and I doubt I would want to. But God infuses my life with meaning. Without Him I would feel like Sisyphus, rolling a rock up a hill just to watch it fall down again. With God I know there is an eternal purpose behind it all.

As I enjoy the secular things I do: playing violin, teaching, reading history books, and playing games, I enjoy them because they are gifts from my Heavenly Father, and that is worship.

Politics and Truth

Politics and truth seem like parallel lines, each pressing toward its desired destination but never crossing paths. I am not so jaded that I’d say all politicians lie. Some of them are genuinely mistaken. They believe in their own promises and think they can fix it all. How can we ever find the truth?

The answer, I fear, is a little closer to home. As Ravi Zacharias said, “The problem in your life and mine is not the availability or lack of availability of the truth. It is the hypocrisy of the search.” It is too easy to blame the politicians for not telling us the truth. Do I sincerely want it?

Am I so hopeful that a candidate can fix the problems of our nation that I will believe whatever promises that person makes? Am I so committed to one person or party that I will close my eyes to faults and incongruities?

I do respect a specific candidate. If you know me well, you can probably guess how I’ll vote. But this post is not for or against any person listed on the ballot. It is about my choice to seek the truth honestly, and it is a call for you to join me. If we commit ourselves to the truth, we can live in personal freedom no matter who wins the White House.

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32 NKJV

Just Playing It Normal

I’ve enjoyed watching my six-year-old violin student blossom this Christmas season. She recently became a confident music reader, and she is learning one Christmas carol after another. She knows no fear. She’ll try any song in her book. That doesn’t mean she’ll play it right. “Silver Bells” has a G sharp. She hasn’t learned that note yet. “I’ll just play it normal,” she told her mom. Her mom and I cringed.

I don’t mean to be picky, but mostly right isn’t right enough. It’s painful. I certainly wouldn’t tell my orchestra conductor, “Don’t worry about that exposed second violin part. We’re almost in tune!”

But how often do I slip into this mentality in my private life? I’m good most of the time. I’m only snippy with my sister once in a while. I was only a little impatient with that student. I only held a little grudge against that person who wronged me.

God has designed an amazing symphony for us to perform with our lives, and I mostly play the right notes. Why should He care if I skip a G sharp once in a while and “just play it normal”? When I tune my ears to hear the symphony the way God composed it, I understand. Then I, too, cringe at my missed sharps and out-of-tune notes.

And that’s the meaning of Christmas. I couldn’t play it right so God joined me. He took on human flesh. He came to die for me because I could not be perfect. He joined the second violin section because I could not play alone.

O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

O holy Child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin, and enter in;
Be born to us today.
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us,
Our Lord Emmanuel.

Eating off Jewish Plates

The line at our church potluck parted like the Red Sea, half to the right of the food table and half to the left.

“Some of these plates are Jewish,” remarked the man across from me.

I gave him a puzzled look.

“We got them from the synagogue,” he explained as he examined the bottom of his plate to find out if he had one of the special plates.

I didn’t bother looking at the bottom of mine. I was more interested in the food. But it did make me think about how often we eat from Jewish plates at church. I’m not talking about literal plates anymore. Most churches aren’t blessed to have Jewish dinnerware in their cupboards, but we all have it in our Bibles. It’s called the Old Testament.

Too often we rush on to the food in the New Testament. That’s where we find things written directly to us. Besides, it’s not as boring as long descriptions about what to do if you find a leprous spot in your wall, how to sacrifice animals, and how many rings to put in the curtains of the tabernacle.

But we miss so much in the New Testament if we don’t understand the Old. In the Old Testament we learn of the holiness of God, and we get a picture of the filthiness of our sin. We learn why death is the punishment for sin and are assured someone can take that punishment for us. We marvel at the care God put into all the details of His dwelling place—the tabernacle. Without that, can we ever understand the wonder of the fact that our bodies are now the temple of the Holy Ghost?

Yes, we can get tasteful bites from the New Testament even if we haven’t read the Old. We can grab a couple chips or a carrot or even a cupcake. But we’ll never get a full meal until we pick up that Jewish plate.

Promising to Lie

Summer is a wonderful time to pursue interests that get squeezed out of my schedule the rest of the year. Over the past few months I have dabbled in everything from molecular biology to Russian history and fantasy fiction.

In July I discovered our local library has the first two books of Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain on CD. A little children’s fiction sounded perfect for a mental break. I checked them out.

The fast-paced plot had me looking for cooking or cleaning jobs to do so I could listen to another chapter. I’m attached to the characters—noble Adaon, loveable Gurgi, and the eager Taran, determined to win honor.

But one scene disturbed me.  Ellidyr agrees to help Taran with a crucial task on one condition: Taran and his comrades must swear an oath that they will lie about what happened. Isn’t that a contradiction? Can you trust someone who promises to lie? Can you trust someone who promises to help on condition that you lie?

On a deeper level, I wonder if Taran surrendered his most powerful weapon when he swore the oath. Solzhenitsyn, the Russian literary giant, faced the might of the Soviet Union with the weapon of truth. Václav Havel led the Czechs to freedom, relying on the same weapon. Os Guiness explained in a lecture at Stanford in 2005:

      …they were aware there were only two ways they could bring down the Soviets: either they had to trump Soviet power with equal or more power—they were a handful of dissidents—unthinkable, or they had to counter Soviet power with another type of power altogether. So that’s what they did, with the power of truth. “Truth prevails for those who live in truth.” And the unthinkable happened. They won.

I wonder if I were Taran, would I have the courage to live by the truth and refuse Ellidyr’s offer, even if it cost me my life? I may never know. But I can choose to live in the truth today.

As Solzhenitsyn said, “One word of truth outweighs the entire world.”