Living Life In Tune

“Come near to God and He will come near to you.” James 4:8

I know of little things more painful to musicians than intonation issues. Even just a few cents (the measurement for pitch) flat or sharp and it’s like tiny pieces of glass stabbing into your ear. 

The piano in my high school choir room hadn’t been tuned in years. Years. Maybe even decades. Yeah. It’s even worse than it sounds.

I always knew it sounded off, but had never really tested it until one day we were working on a new song—my director using the piano to give pitches—and for some reason I just couldn’t settle into a key. My eyebrows squashed together I tried to find it. What was going on? This wasn’t something I normally struggled with.

When the sopranos finished their rep, I crept my hand into the air. The choir teacher noticed and called on me. I explained my problem. Biting my lip, I asked, “Should we test the piano’s tuning?” 

She figured it couldn’t hurt and tapped on her phone to open the tuning app. She played a note and cringed. “That was an F,” she said and then showed me the face of her phone. It registered as an E. A whole half-step flat! No wonder I was so lost in the song. *cringe!*  We were all as a choir splitting to either an E or an F messing everyone up. We were horribly out of tune. 

We can Be Out of Tune In Life, too

There’s times when life just doesn’t make sense. There’s days when you’re on edge and don’t know why. There’s times when nothing seems to go right. If we would just make some small adjustments in our lives we would be in much better shape.

Something that has helped me stay in better tune has been consistent time with God. 

In sixth grade, my youth leader challenged us to commit to personal devotional time with God. Being the rule follower that I am, I didn’t miss a single day that whole summer.

Guys, that totally changed my life. Before then, I only read the Bible when I felt like it—which was almost never because the Bible is NOT an easy book to understand. But once spending time with God became a discipline, my eyes were opened up to God’s love in ways I never could have imagined. The more I read, the more I understood. 

There are still days when I don’t feel like reading Scripture or I just don’t know where to start, but when every night I open my Bible, there’s more chances that I hear God speak in an amazing way. Kind of like statistics. The more times you do something, the higher possibility of the desired outcome. 

Personal time with God can be a fantastic way to stay in-tune with Him. If this isn’t already a habit of yours, I highly encourage you to try it out! Just a few minutes of reading scriptures could help you in ways you can’t even dream of, just like small tweaks to a instruments tuning makes ALL the difference.