The Metronome and the Thing That Came

Four o'clock on a Tuesday, the same as every Tuesday, and the metronome is going at eighty-eight because that is where they always start.

Her teacher is on the chair to the left of the bench, close enough that if you stop, she knows before the sound stops. Two years of Tuesdays. They are working on a piece with a left hand that has to stay completely even while the right hand does something that is not even at all, which is the entire difficulty of the piece and is the reason they are still on it in April.

Bars one through eight are fine.

And in bar nine something surfaces.

We are not going to describe it and I am not going to ask you what yours is. It surfaces. She was counting. She was doing the thing you do where most of you is on the left hand, and it arrived the way these things arrive, sideways and complete and out of absolutely nowhere, at a piano, at four in the afternoon, three feet from an adult.

Her hands keep going for about half a bar out of pure habit and then they do not.

And her teacher says, from the chair: you're all right, take it from nine.

And she says: sorry, I lost it.

And that is the sentence. That is the sentence she has been saying, in one form or another, for two years, in this room and about eleven other places. Sorry, I lost it. Sorry, I zoned out. Sorry, what was the question. It is such a small, ordinary, sixteen-year-old thing to say that nobody has ever looked twice at it, and behind it is something she has never said out loud to one single person on this earth.

She takes it from nine. She gets it right. The metronome does not care.

And you know that bench. Something arrives that you did not choose to keep and cannot get out, and you are in the middle of a completely normal afternoon, and you cover it in about a second and a half because covering it is the only skill anybody ever handed you for this.

So take this in before we go one step further, because I think you are braced for somebody to make it a bigger deal than you can handle right now. You are not broken and there is nothing wrong with you. Romans 7:20 has a grown man in the Bible drawing the exact line between himself and what shows up in him, and he wrote it down on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is in this room with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

How the psalm about the sky ends

There is a psalm that starts enormous. The heavens declare the glory of God, day unto day utters speech, the sun coming out like somebody coming out of a tent. It is the biggest possible opening. Then it turns and spends a while on how good and clean and right God's word is.

And then, at the very end, after all of that, the man writing it says something small and very personal, and it is the line this whole article lives in.

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.Psalm 19:14

The meditation of my heart. That is the inside. That is the part nobody sees, the part that runs underneath the words of the mouth, and here is what matters most about the line: he hands it over.

He does not claim to have it sorted. He does not report that his inside is clean. He does not say: my meditations are acceptable. He asks that they be, which is the posture of somebody who knows perfectly well what goes on in there and is bringing it to God anyway rather than waiting until it is presentable.

You are able to hand the inside over exactly as it is, and it was always meant to be handed rather than fixed first. The written word ends the biggest psalm about the sky with a private request about the inside of one person, which tells you God is not less interested in bar nine than in the stars; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that invitation into a front room at four o'clock on a Tuesday.

And notice the two names he uses at the end. My strength, and my redeemer. Not my judge. He is talking to the one who holds him up and the one who buys things back, and those are the two he reaches for when he is about to mention what goes on inside him.

The covering is the tiring part

I want to name something that nobody may have named for you, and it is not the thing you think.

The arrival takes a second. You have no vote in it. Everybody's head produces material continuously without asking permission first, and this is true of your teacher and your mother and the person you would least expect.

The covering is what is exhausting. Sorry, I lost it. Sorry, I zoned out. That half-second of choosing a normal face and a normal voice, and then holding it, and then finishing the piece, and then carrying on with the afternoon as though the last ninety seconds did not happen. You have done that hundreds of times in two years and you have gotten extremely good at it, and being good at it means nobody has ever asked, and nobody asking is the loneliest part of the whole thing.

You were not weak to start covering, and you were fourteen and nobody had handed you anything else. Psalm 139:12 says the darkness and the light are both alike to Him, which means there is no part of your inside that is dim to God and none of it is a surprise to Him; His Spirit is at home in there already and He is not waiting for a tidier version.

And there is a second half that ought to be said plainly to somebody your age. You are not required to tell an adult everything, and this article is not going to instruct you to go and disclose anything to anybody. That is yours. What is true is that carrying this entirely alone is heavier than it needs to be, and there is a difference between being made to tell and getting to choose one safe person.

You are allowed to choose, and nobody gets to choose it for you. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and it says it about where He already is rather than about what you have to do to get Him there; the same Spirit doing that drawing near is the one who has been on that bench with you for two years of Tuesdays.

And if what surfaces is heavier than a page can hold, do not carry it by yourself. Find a real person, someone safe, in the next week or so, one who can sit with you without needing to fix a thing, and let it be somebody you do not have to be finished in front of.

Take it from nine

Here is what I want you to notice about your teacher, because she did something in that room that was better than she knew.

She did not ask what happened. She did not make a thing of it. She said: you're all right, take it from nine.

That is exactly the right instruction and she gave it by accident. You are all right. And the next thing to do is not to solve the last ninety seconds, it is to put your hands back on the keys and pick up two bars earlier than where you fell out.

That is the whole method, and it is not a small one. Something surfaced. You are all right. Take it from nine.

You are all right and the next bar is available to you, and both of those are true right now. Scripture says let the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, and he prays it as somebody who is going to keep on writing psalms rather than as somebody who has to stop until he is clean; the Holy Spirit is the one who put a plain sentence in a piano teacher's mouth at exactly the moment you needed it.

So bar nine is not a verdict. It is bar nine, and the left hand has to stay even, and that is the actual difficulty in the room. And you are sixteen, and you are all right.